Well, hello there; it’s been a while. Like many, I have been a bit overwhelmed with the massive change being imposed on the education sector which has led me to lacking the energy to write and share my thoughts. Thankfully, many others, including Derek Wenmoth and the awesome contributors to the Aotearoa Educators Collective (AEC) Substack, have been regularly publishing outstanding pieces. I highly recommend you subscribe to AEC Substack and to Derek’s weekly newsletter.
My state of malaise had got me thinking about how we, in the sector, can maintain and sustain our own wellbeing and resilience and I settled on this hunch:
Your wellbeing is more likely to be strong if you have strong, productive relationships with students and they feel engaged in their learning because it is meaningful to them, and that you can find meaning in your work.
The first part focuses on you creating the conditions that allow for strong, productive relationships and on you designing learning in ways that engage students.
The second part of my hunch/hypothesis focuses on the absolute importance of you finding meaning and, dare I say it, joy in your work.
I’ve attempted to capture my thoughts in a diagram:
In this post I plan to address the first part of my hunch that focuses on Relationships and Meaningful Learning:
Your wellbeing is more likely to be strong if we have strong, productive relationships with students and they feel engaged in their learning because it is meaningful to them
I am not a researcher nor an academic so the hunch largely comes out of 30+ years of school leadership in a diverse range of schools. Along the way I’ve stumbled on some ways of thinking about the ways we could be doing our work and, thankfully, some clever people have been able to shape them into frameworks that I have found useful.
Relationships
This all started for me with my investigation of Restorative Practice in the early 2000s at Ōpōtiki College. As a school, we needed to find different ways to manage the huge number of behavioural issues we were experiencing. Whatever punishments we applied we seemed to be having no impact.
Eventually we discovered this framework which combines a strong sense of care with clearly defined structures and limits.
Rather than our approaches being driven by the blue box we decided to have them driven by the green box, while doing our best to avoid falling into the pinkish box.
Our approach was so successful we started thinking that if a relationship-based approach to behaviour management could work, what about a relationship-based approach to curriculum and pedagogy? How could we take the concept of being warm and demanding (“I care for you, but I cannot accept these behaviours - what are we going to do?) and shift it to our pedagogy? (“I care for you and I will find ways for you to experience success. I won’t give up”.)
We moved to 100 minute periods, 3 day wananga and small group 100 minute Learning Advisories.
These are the features the staff settled on when it comes to being a Warm and Demanding teacher.
These are all mindset issues - they are not programmes you can grab off the shelf, they are the mindsets that shape how you view your work. Our challenge was to take these elements of teacher mindset and make sure they drove our practice. This work is never complete.
I am sure you’ve all come across the work of Russell Bishop about teaching to the north-east.
I have included the cold/warm/demanding/undemanding labels with his permission. His research shows that it is the combination of High Relationships and High Teaching Skills, the combination of creating a family like context for learning and teaching in ways we know promote learning, the combination of showing you care for kids and that you have high expectations (self, colleagues, students), the combination of being Warm & Demanding that brings about success.
Agency Increases Engagement
This brings me to another framework which points us to how we can make learning meaningful for all of our students by simply increasing the level of agency ākonga experience in their learning. This is from the book The Disengaged Teen
The authors argue that students can be Passengers who cruise along doing the bare minimum as a result of not being engaged AND having no sense of agency or influence over what is being learned. They can be Resistors who have no engagement with the learning but use the agency or influence they have to push back and to make clear they are not engaged.
We might believe the Achiever mode would be the desired state. These students certainly work hard and gain very good results, but this is usually at the cost of fear of failure and high levels of anxiety.
It is the Explorer mode we should be aiming for where students are engaged BECAUSE OF the agency and influence they have in what they are learning. When young people are driven by internal curiosity rather than just external expectations, they investigate the questions they care about and persist to achieve their goals.
The good news is we know how to move students into Explorer mode.
How do we increase the engagement of our Resisters and move Resisters to Explorers? We can engage them simply by linking learning to their interests. In fact, one of the easiest shifts through the zones is from Resister to Explorer zone simply by linking learning in such a way.
How do we increase the engagement and agency of our Passengers and move them to Explorers? We can move students out of the Passenger zone (disengaged and coasting) by linking learning to what the student is interested in - just as for the Resisters. They will most probably need more scaffolds as we search for that sweet spot described by the Zone of Proximal Development - not too easy, not too challenging, but linked to their interests.
How do we increase the agency of our unhappy Achievers? We can move students out of the Achiever zone by supporting them to practice trying things, falling down, reflecting on why they fell, and getting back up and trying again. Working with these students, in particular, on Growth Mindset is hugely valuable (though this is true of all students no matter what zone they’re in.)
So my summary at this point around what it is we should be focusing on to maintain our own wellbeing would be:
Be warm & demanding
It must be both - locate yourself firmly in the north-east.
Allow for more, not less, student agency
See yourself as a learning designer and invite your students into the learning design process. The more challenging the student is (think Passenger, think Resister) provide for more agency.
My next post will explore the second part of my hunch:
Your wellbeing is more likely to be strong if you ……. can find meaning in your work.
