S7 E1 - The Three Critical Questions Your Students Are Silently Asking You

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Hello and welcome to a brand new season of the Structured Literacy Podcast recorded right here in Pataway Burnie on the lands of the Palawa people. I'm Jocelyn, and strangely, for a podcast about literacy, I'm not starting the year talking about reading and writing. Today we are going to explore three critical questions your students will be asking the second they set foot in your classroom and how you can make sure that you aren't unintentionally sabotaging your entire year of teaching.

In most schools, the new year means a new set of relationships to build because you have a new group of students. In the primary school, you could have 25 to 30 new faces to welcome, and in the secondary school, so many more than that. Each new student brings both potential opportunity and potential challenge. We spend time in the first days of the school year trying to figure out which box students belong in. Are they the struggler, the cheeky one, the chatty one, the advanced student who needs extending, or the pointy end trouble student who you know is going to take up a lot of your time. Before your students even enter the classroom, you have hopefully looked at data and probably asked last year's teachers for the inside scoop. The reality is that you will have formed your opinions about your students by the end of the first day back at school.

And guess what? They will have done the same. By the end of the first day, and certainly by the end of the first week, your students will have formed their views about you. And they'll do this looking for the answers to three questions. Incidentally, these are the same questions we all ask when we're in a new situation.

Question one, do you like me? Question two, are you going to help me? Question three, can I trust you?

Question One: Do You Like Me?

The first question, do you like me, is quite closely related to the questions, am I good enough? and, am I worthy of your time? If we're honest, acceptance and belonging are critical factors in building connection with anyone, and the same things that enhance that for adults also do it for students. A mistake we often make in this regard is delivering a start-of-the-year hardline, no-nonsense, take-no prisoner's speech about behaviour expectations without the balance of a connecting conversation. Connecting conversations are personal. They say, I'm with you, we are a team, I believe in you.

I'm not talking about being soft or being our students' friends. In the classroom, I'm the boss. I'm responsible for outcomes, and I communicate boundaries about expectations very clearly. But this stance is in service of learning, and here's something we all know. We learn best from people we like and who we feel like us. Learning, deep learning, that we only achieve by doing hard things, will not happen in the absence of connection. So it's important to genuinely connect with your students, even those who exhibit challenging behaviours. And on that, please give every student the chance to succeed. If you've decided that a student is a problem before school even begins for the year, you've sabotaged the student and any chance they have had to succeed in your classroom.

Believe me, I know how hard unconditional positive regard is. I know what it's like to feel frustrated by behaviour that disrupts lessons and leaves you thinking, "Oh, for goodness sake, I just want to teach. Can you give it a rest?" If you have those moments, cut yourself some slack, you're human too. But also remember this: students engage when they can. If we want our students to participate and engage fully, then we have to engineer their success.

Question Two: Are You Going to Help Me?

This leads to the second question that students need us to answer. Are you going to help me? Believe it or not, students know what good teaching feels like. They want us to be explicit, structured and skilled. For me, explicit teaching has always been centred in the spirit of, "I've got you. I will hold you gently in my hands, and I will not let you fall." Learning is much stronger when students perceive that the teacher is credible, that the teacher is organised, that the teacher is paying attention to their progress and responding in kind.

Our students, particularly our older students, are now as aware of the need for daily review, repeated practice, breaking things down into small chunks and active engagement as we are. When these things aren't done, when teachers barrel through content, clicking slides or assigning tasks because that's what's in the plan, without considering where students are up to, when teachers assign busy work in place of quality tasks, when we add things into the end of a topic test or a summative task that haven't actually been taught, students know. Just as teachers want leaders and providers of professional learning to be credible, skilled, and knowledgeable, our students are looking for markers of teacher capability. It makes them feel safe.

Question Three: Can I Trust You?

Can I trust you? Is the final question you will be exploring today, and it's multifaceted. I think that one of the most significant aspects of this is, can I trust you not to make me feel stupid? Emotional safety is a biological necessity. I've shared this before, but I'm saying it again because it is so important. David Sousa's book, How the Brain Learns, is now in its sixth edition. It's a really easy read and explains cognitive complex processes in a way that we can all understand.

Sousa tells us that there's a hierarchy of response to sensory input, and I'm reading from the book now:

"Any input of higher priority diminishes the processing of lower priority data. The brain's main job is to help its owner survive, and emotional data takes high priority. When an individual responds emotionally to a situation, the older limbic system, stimulated by the amygdala, takes a major role and complex cognitive processes are suspended."

In other words, when we feel heightened emotion related to threat, when we're feeling anxious about being put in the deep end of a learning situation that we do not feel prepared for, any thinking about new learning is just put to one side while our brain processes that perceived threat.

Sousa goes on,

"Emotion is a powerful and misunderstood force in learning and memory."

Another way of stating the hierarchy is that before students will turn their attention to cognitive learning or the curriculum, they must feel physically safe and emotionally secure in the school environment.

Now I'm not saying, in sharing this with you, that there can be no learning until relationships are fully embedded and strong. But what I am saying is that we have an opportunity and an obligation to help students feel safe and successful in the learning we present to them.

Building Trust: Practical Strategies

So let me finish this week's episode with some practical ways we can answer that question, 'can I trust you' with a surrounding yes?

Stop asking students to do things they don't know how to do

First thing, stop asking students to do things they don't know how to do.

This might sound like the most obvious thing in the universe, but if we're honest with ourselves, there's a good chance that we do this more than we might think. How many times have you found yourself instructing a student to "just have a try" when they're having trouble writing or "sound it out" when they don't have the phonics knowledge to do so?

We need to always reflect and ask ourselves, does this student actually have the prerequisite skills and knowledge to complete this task?

What would happen if we took radical responsibility for making sure that students had repeated practice of everything we wanted them to learn?

What would happen if we checked to make sure that the students have the prerequisite skills and knowledge to fully engage in the learning at hand?

Well, I know what would happen because the schools I work with who are moving into this space of instructional design and making key decisions for student learning needs based on what the students actually need are seeing wonderful results.

Model and openly support an environment where errors are valued

Next on the list of trust-building techniques is to model and openly support an environment where errors are valued. It's not just about saying, "oh, everyone makes mistakes," but about embracing them. Having students repeat mantras such as "Fixing is learning" and "Learning from mistakes is my superpower" can help all students understand that there is no shame in errors. In fact, making errors and learning from them really is one of the best ways to truly understand something. I'm not talking about discovering, I'm talking about scaffolded instruction where there is room for students to recover from errors as we move from you do with support to you do on your own. And of course, when you make your own errors, show students that you're ok with not being perfect too. We're pretty good at this. We might not be so great at setting students up for success in the first place consistently enough.

Create lots of opportunity for success

Next, we have one of the most critical elements to consider: create lots of opportunity for success. Our job as teachers is to set students up for success. They shouldn't have to participate in a game of 'guess what's in my head', or need to earn the opportunity to get things right. All lessons need to:

1. Be taught in a way that all students can connect with first so that students have the foundation of the lesson,
2. Present a task that requires students to think and stretch, but do that within the bounds of their current skills and understanding,
3. Provide feedback so that students know what they got right,
4. Allow them to fix any errors.

Lessons should be pitched at that sweet spot for the students so that they have suitable stretch, but don't snap. Sometimes students' confidence is so low that you have to finagle the content so the student is 100% guaranteed to experience success. This is not a long-term strategy, but can help build trust between teacher and student. Give them a taste of what success feels like. Earn their trust, do what you say you are going to do, and you might be surprised at how well they participate.

Be Insistent, Consistent, and Persistent

And finally, we have three little words. If you've done a course with me, you'll know what they are. They are be insistent, consistent, and persistent.

There is no opting-out of learning allowed in a high expectations, high trust classroom. And you can be confident in declaring no opt-out in your classroom because you know in your bones that you have set students up for success. Having a no opt-out approach when we haven't taught with flawless communication, where we know that every student has learned what we have taught, is not fair. It makes students anxious. But no opt-out when we've covered all the bases? Absolutely.

Consistent is about just that. If you have an expectation for silent lining up outside the classroom on Monday, you need to have the same expectation all the way to Friday. We can't be loosey-goosey when we are feeling a bit tired and expect that students will respond as we need them to.

The last one, being persistent, is tricky, particularly when it comes to behaviour-related aspects of the classroom. "I've tried that and it didn't work," is something we hear all the time. But if we've only given it a day or a week, this isn't really how it works. The older students get, the more they know that they can just outlast the adults, they have had too many times when the adults in their lives, either at home or at school, have just given in because the kids waited them out. So you might have some work to do to build credibility and expectations in the longer term.

Conclusion

Here's what I want you to know as you head into this new school year: answering these three questions for your students, do you like me? are you going to help me? can I trust you? isn't separate from your literacy instruction or your other curriculum goals. It is the foundation that makes all of that possible.

When students feel liked, when they trust that you will genuinely help them, and when they know you won't let them fail or make them feel foolish, something remarkable happens. They lean in, they take risks, they do the hard cognitive work that real learning requires. And isn't that what we're all here for?

You don't need to be perfect. You don't need to get it right every single time. What you need is to be intentional about building these relationships, consistent in your approach, and willing to reflect on whether your students would answer yes to these three critical questions.

So as you prepare for these first days back, I encourage you not just to think about what you're going to teach, but also about how you're going to make sure that every single student in your care knows you belong here, I will help you, you can trust me.

Because when they know that, everything else becomes possible.

Thanks for joining me on the Structured Literacy Podcast. Until I see you next time, happy teaching. Bye.

References:

Sousa, D. A. (2022). How the brain learns (6th ed.). Corwin Press.

Ready to show your upper primary students they belong, you will help them, and they can trust you with learning to read? Click HERE.