Stand up for yourself (part 1 of 2)

The start of year always brings up settling-in issues, and it has been a busy few weeks in High School.  All the issues are being resolved very happily, I am pleased to report, but what has been most interesting to me was that many very different situations have had the same solution. I think there’s a point central to the role of High School here, and indeed to the role of parents of teenagers approaching independence.

Two (hypothetical but illustrative) examples:

• A student is upset that a classmate was given an extension for a homework but he was not.
• A student is worried that class seems very different to last year, and that she may not learn as much.

These are both really important issues, and we need to know if any student is upset about anything at school (please don’t hesitate to tell us). To address the issues, though, we have to distinguish between how the student is feeling and what the problem may be.  These are often not the same thing at all. In the first case it is not hard to imagine personal circumstances that make this individualised approach the right one; we do after all try to adapt to individual needs.  In the second case we know that being uncomfortable can be a powerful learning opportunity (so is it a problem at all?).  In fact, these issues here may not be about homework, or learning, at all.  In which case, we cannot jump into action to ‘solve’ these problems.

Then what to do? I am certainly not suggesting that we belittle the student's feelings, ignore them, or deny them; in fact precisely the reverse.  We need to acknowledge the emotion and distress. But that acknowledgement should stop there, and we need to resist the temptation to sympathise, as that simply does not help the student. So in the first case it’s so much better to respond with a slow and thoughtful You’re upset as that seems really unfair to you; might there be any reasons you can think of that might explain this? than with an aggrieved This must change; I’ll write to make an appointment with the Head of Grade immediately. The former validates the feelings but opens up a potentially rich conversation that might lead to insight; the latter cements a sense of injustice which cannot support learning. Worse, it invites a sense of helplessness in our students.

So having had a conversation, what then? Of course, there may well need to be some action. In High School, the action is the same, time and time again, almost without exception.  And that has to be that the student approaches the teacher, and raises the issues. There are at least two reasons:

The answer is: Not if we don't allow these skills to grow in the first place.

• in most cases, things can be amicably agreed - in cases like these it's not unusual to hear oh now I see how it must have looked to you! and it's usually the case that disagreements simply dissolve on open discussion.  As one parent recently wrote so elegantly, agreeing the need for conversation when her daughter saw things differently to a teacher somewhere between the two stories, the elusive "truth" may lie.

• in most cases, next steps become immediately obvious, and the issue just goes away. The student has solved the problem, but much, much more importantly, enhanced his or her capacity to solve problems. The impact of that cannot be overstated - indeed, it is quite close to the overall aim of education, in my view.

It's understandable that these conversations can appear daunting to students,  but in fact, they are rarely very difficult. Indeed, it’s our job, as teachers listening and as parents advising, to ensure they are not - but any slight trickiness is not necessarily a bad thing. If you want to strengthen a wobbly arch, you put pressure on it; you force a better connection between the individual parts.  Pressure is part of the process - if it were entirely easy, there would't be an issue at all.   As with arches, so with people, so with relationships; and our professional experience over many years, in many contexts, in many schools is absolutely consistent on this point:

We do our students and children a grave disservice if we cannot allow them, indeed do not push them, to advocate for themselves.  School is about as safe as environment to learn self-advocacy as they can find, so if we deny them the opportunity to have difficult conversations on their own, then they have missed some of the most significant chances for personal growth.

This fits into the old wisdom about the four stages of helping children become independent.  First you do it for them, then you do it with them; then you watch them do it; and finally you let them do it themselves.  That final stage is where we are in High School, in these brief and precious four years before we loose our children onto the world without us.