Several recent but separate issues involving families and teachers have all have had the same solution and what’s emerged for me is a central matter of the fundamental purpose of education.
- A student is upset that a classmate was given an extension for a homework but that he was not.
- A student is worried that class seems very different to last year, and that she may not learn as much.
- A student is anxious about their upcoming presentation because they feel uncomfortable speaking in front of a large group.
- A student believes their teacher mis-graded a project but they are unwilling to approach the teacher about it.
These are all really important issues, and need attention. To address the issues, though, we have to distinguish between how the student is feeling and what the problem may be. The may be an absolute alignment between the two, or they may not be 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 and third cases we know that being uncomfortable can be a powerful learning opportunity (so is it a problem at all?). In the fourth, is the problem the grading or fear? Or both? Or neither? In all these cases, furthermore, it’s possible that there are be other things (friendship issues?) that are the real issue, and it is the stress from these other isuses that is manifesting as something else.
So we should not jump into action to ‘solve’ these problems.
Then what to do, as parents? I am certainly not suggesting that we belittle our child’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 as a 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 That’s outrageous! So unfair! 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 – and that has to be that the student approaches the teacher, and raises the issues. In the first instance it should not be us, the parents. There are at least two reasons:
- 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 one of the central aims of education, in my view, because it is hard to overestimate the importance of agency and advocacy in later life.
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 and it will only be harder later on.
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.
