Approximate reading time is 30 min
All eyes on you
Towards the end of the last term, I took an assembly with my nursery children and the two reception classes. At the end of the assembly I put up a YouTube video of one of the songs that we always sing and then I sat down at the side of the hall. As I sat down I briefly glanced up at the kids and it was one of those weird, freaky moments that just stuck with me because the only thing I saw were eyes. It seemed like 80 little pair of eyes were glued on me, rather than looking at the screen. For me, it was such a distinct reminder of how much little children’s attention is cemented on us all the time. This is the age that they watch everything from how we handle conflict, to how we treat our friends to most importantly how we treat ourselves. By the same token, they also listen to everything. I have to admit, as a teacher, the fact that so many people don’t get this has been a frustration for me for years. I can’t even begin to count the number of times I have had to stop parents (and sometimes teachers) and ask them if they wouldn’t mind rather stepping outside, to chat privately, before they start cataloguing a child’s issues. The truth of the matter is if a child continually hears themselves being described as shy, terrible at maths or heaven forbid lazy and rude (the list is endless) then that is 100% going to become their reality. It may very well be true that this is how the child is behaving/reacting at this particular point in time but this type of behaviour doesn’t define who the child is.
Small children do not yet have the cognitive ability to rationalise and critically analyse what they hear from adults. As far as they are concerned everything we say is the truth. (We are after all superheroes, who in their eyes can still do or say no wrong!😉) Years ago I was sitting listening to a conversation where a young mother was talking about how her daughter never had any friends at school and how angry she was about this. (No doubt her anger was simply a mask for her sadness and fear for her child.) I listened as her friend tried to make ‘suggestions’ of who she could encourage her daughter to play with. Unfortunately, this mother seemed to have an issue with most of the children in the playground “Oh so-and-so is a bully” or “I just don’t like that kid” or “She is just a weird child”. The whole time this conversation was going on I sat watching her daughter who was on the floor next to her. She was supposed to be colouring in but in actuality, she was sitting staring wide-eyed at her mother. My heart absolutely broke for that little girl. Internally I was screaming: “She can hear you, you know!” but yet again I never had the strength to actually say anything. Was it any wonder this poor child was anxious and having trouble finding friends? How could she possibly go into that playground and attempt to form emotional bonds with other children when she had so many preconceived, negative ideas of them floating around in her head?
That moment stuck with me, as have countless others through the years. So I am saying it now: Our words around children truly do have the power to make or break them and that doesn’t just mean cruel or unkind words. We need to choose our words so carefully because the fact of the matter is what we continually tell ourselves and others about our children will become their ultimate reality.
Dr Wayne Dyer was a psychotherapist and world-famous author who wrote a book about personal transformation called “You’ll See It When You Believe It.” The title of this book is a beautiful reversal of the old age idiom: “I’ll believe it when I see it”. The main point Dyer was trying to make with this book was that ANY change you want to make in your life fundamentally has to start with your belief about that change. Simply put, if you don’t believe that something is even possible, then the chances of it actually happening are minimal. Growth and change have to start with the right beliefs. This is an idea that I have carried into my work. As a teacher, I realise now that I absolutely have to see the best in all of my students. I have to believe that they ALL have the ability to grow into kind, compassionate, happy human beings. It’s my job to see the goodness in them even when /or if they are behaving atrociously. It’s my job to see past all those secondary emotions that might be flaring up in them and to continually remind them that I see their greater potential. Even when they are behaving terribly they are still innately good, beautiful souls that need to be reminded of this, regularly. As a result of my beliefs about children, I got into the habit over these last 6 months, of changing the way I speak to and reprimand my students. The basic technique that I used is simple and yet so effective. I try to always start with the positives. If I see a child hurting or being unkind to another child the first thing I do is make it very clear to the child that this is not how I see them. After that, I will go on to describe the problem that I am seeing. My foremost goal is to always separate the child from the behaviour. So I might say something like:
“Sarah, I know you are always such a kind girl. How do you think Janice feels when you don’t want to share with her? ” or “Jake, I love how you are always such a good friend to the other boys in our class. Can you tell me why you are so angry with Alex? Now the truth of the matter might be that Jake isn’t always a good friend, in fact, half the time Jake might be extremely unkind to the other children. But herein lies the problem, the chances are pretty high that Jake already knows this about himself. He finds it difficult to share, reacts with anger whenever he feels threatened or scared and carries around his own feelings of intense shame that ultimately leads to him lashing out even more. Jake has no idea how to change this pattern. The Jakes of the world are self-fulfilling prophecies that go through school with very few friends and often spend most of their time being in trouble with both their parents and their teachers. The Jakes of this world often end up being bullies because, as we have already seen, anger makes them feel more in control and less vulnerable. While this example of Jake is, by all means, an extreme one I am just using it to make a point. Jake has absolutely no positive beliefs about himself. This is where I believe that our beliefs are so powerful. The only way a child is ever going to start creating more positive beliefs about themselves is if someone starts modelling them for them. If we want our children to thrive in life and to build up strong healthy personal beliefs about themselves then we absolutely have to start by looking at our own beliefs about them. I can’t even begin to explain how powerful a positive belief in a child can be. All children need constant reminders that we have noticed their goodness even if those aren’t yet the traits that they are showing. As Dr Dyer says: We have to believe it before we see it! So what am I suggesting….should we lie to kids? Umm yes, abso-fucking-lutely!😉 Except scientifically speaking, we are not actually lying…we are simply planting seeds of thought that have the potential to develop into positive neural pathways.
Dr Joe Dispenza is a neuroscientist and researcher whose work I have followed quite extensively over the last couple of years. Joe combines the fields of quantum physics, neuroscience, brain chemistry, biology and genetics to teach you how to rewire your brain for health and happiness. In this video above, he talks implicitly about the power of belief and how when we fall in love with an abstraction (A thought) we can essentially wire our brains to start experiencing that exact thought, more regularly. Hence the more we think that thought the more likely it will become our future. He ends the video by asking us who we are going to rehearse ourselves to be every morning.
My question as a teacher is who am I going to rehearse my students to be every single day?
As a result of this, I watch my kids like a hawk, most especially the Jakes of this world. I am continually on the lookout for even the slightest of positive behaviours that I can praise my students for. It is not just a matter of thanking them or praising them for a job well done, it is also about attaching deeper positive beliefs to the many jobs that they do daily. eg “Thank you for hanging up your apron.” (Postive praise) “I love how tidy and considerate you always are.” (Building in belief) (I will admit sometimes it’s hard to say when 98% of the time they just drop the aprons the floor😂.)
So I thought would give a few examples of how I have, over the last 6 months, been using this method in my class and the positive ways I have seen it impact some of my students.
Justine was an exceptionally quiet and hypersensitive child. She never spoke on the carpet and spent most of her free choosing-time playing quietly by herself. I will never forget the day I put on a video of the three little pigs. When the big, bad, (oh so scary wolf) came onto the screen Justine practically jumped out of her skin and turned around to look at me – her face filled with absolute terror. Before I could say anything to her she had jumped up, ran over to me and threw her arms around my legs clinging to me for dear life. (The poor child was literally shaking.😯) Growing up as a hypersensitive child, I know how terrifying and overwhelming so many things used to feel for me, so my heart just absolutely went out to her. I also knew that I somehow had to start programming this little girl with the belief that, despite her sensitivity, she can also be brave and courageous. (For the record: I do not see sensitivity in a child as a trait that needs to be ‘cured’. Sensitive children can be some of the kindest, most compassionate kids you’ll ever meet. More than anything they simply need emotional support on how to experience their overwhelming feelings and to deal with them in an appropriate manner.) So my main focus with Justine was noticing and then pointing out the various things that she did that took bravery. (No matter how small they were). It might have been something as simple as her trying a new type of activity or playing with a new friend. “Justine I’m so happy to see you playing with Yasmin today. It takes a lot of courage to play with new people. I love how SUPER brave you always are!” I will never forget in my last week at school we watched Ratatouille and there are a couple of loud semi/scary scenes in that movie.😉 At one point during one of them, I saw Justine suddenly sit up straight and quickly turn around to look at me.
The look on her face said it all: “I am slightly scared, but I am SUPER brave. Just checking you are still there!” I got a small smile from her and she turned back around and continued to watch the film. It’s moments like those that make being a teacher so awesome. 😁
Sandeep was was an incredibly bright little boy who struggled quite a bit with his letters and sounds. As is so often the case with these children he happens to be an amazing little artist. Realizing that he would probably find his more formal school years a little more challenging I so desperately wanted him to know NOW what his strengths and gifts were. As a result, I tried to regularly build him up in this area. “I love how you used your own ideas to create your picture. You are such a creative child. ” After a while Sandeep started coming over to me and asking me: “Can I go do something creative?” or “I feel like being creative today?” (It is always interesting to see how little children love learning and using big words😁)
This last example actually comes from a year 1 class that I worked with this week and I just had to add it in. I was only in the class for two days and I had the pleasure of meeting Stephano. In a nutshell, Stephano is gorgeous, cute, chatty, literally can’t sit still and is highly skilled in the art of body parts percussion. (Every teacher knows exactly who I am talking about!😉) One of the activities on my first day was a simple cutting exercise where the children had to practice using a pair of scissors by cutting along straight lines. (Sounds simple enough…..um nope!🙄) Stephano, who is incidentally also left-handed, found this incredibly difficult and got highly frustrated. I attempted to help him but a few minutes after I had walked away he scrunched up his whole worksheet and threw it in the bin. (Enough said!)
The next day the children had a similar activity except now they needed to cut along a zig-zag pattern. (OH brother!😫) When I managed to get around to him his piece of paper was yet again a scrunched up mess with the scissors literally jammed up in the middle of it. I attempted to help him (again) but I quickly realised that this wasnt going to end well. Stephano looked at me with a look that can loosely be translated as “Die!” So I decided to try my newly learnt tactic on him. “Stephano I love how resilient you are.” (He looks at me like I’m speaking Greek) “Do you know what resilient means?” (He shakes his head doubtfully “Gees lady I am only six years old ya know!“) “If someone is resilient Stephano, it means that they never give up. They keep trying, even when they find things super hard at first. You are resilient because even though you are finding it difficult to use the pair of scissors you keep trying.” I left Stephano to carry on with his cutting and when I walked back around a few minutes later…low and behold….he was, still sitting down and butchering his piece of paper with the greatest of gusto. By the end of the lesson he had barely managed to cut out even half of a zig-zag, but the true battle won for him, that day, was that this time he never actually gave up. At the end of the day, I was even more surprised to see that instead of handing his work in like I had asked him to; Stephano had secretly hidden it in his desk. I only realised this because bless him, when we were packing up to go home he had suddenly whipped it out and started cutting again. Clearly, he had taken my resilient comment to heart. 😂
Make affirmations a daily ritual
As a qualified life coach, I have always been a firm believer in the power of positive affirmations and I used them religiously when I started coaching myself about ten years ago. Last year I started watching videos by a UK hypnotherapist called Marisa Peers who has spent nearly three decades treating clients that include international superstars, CEOs, Royalty, and Olympic athletes. In many of her videos, Marisa stresses how throughout her 30 years of working with patients and clients she has found that they essentially all had the same underlying issue. Whether they have food addictions, alcohol or drug addictions, suffer from depression etc. the underlying issue (and belief) is that that people do not feel like they are enough. Her work has given me a lot to think about when it came to my students because I realised, without a shadow of a doubt, that the only thing I really want my pupils to learn from me is that they are enough. They are good enough. They are kind enough. They are strong enough. They are clever enough. They are beautiful enough…..
Last year when I was thinking about this I decided to make a poster of these exact words and I stuck a couple of copies around my room to help remind me and my students of this basic fact. I also gave a copy to a colleague of mine for her to put up in her classroom. She, however, did one better than that. Her Year 1 classroom was next to mind so every morning, first thing, I got to listen to 30 little voices chanting these words at the top of their lungs and it absolutely filled my heart with joy every time. I promised myself that If ever had my own class again I would do the same thing with them, which is exactly what I did with my Nursery class. I can’t even begin to tell you how much my children LOVED doing this. We added little actions and turned it into a daily routine that always left them absolutely beaming afterwards. Once while I was doing an art activity with a few children, a little ESL girl (English as a second language) who spoke very little English sat at the table grinning from ear to ear while repeating “I’m strong” “I’m am brave”. The kids were brilliant at remember this part of our daily routine, even though I forgot on numerous occasions. The second last day of school was one such day…. as I stood up to walk over to the art station to show them what we were going to be doing that day 22 little voices just erupted into
All I could think was: “Thank you God, my job is done!”
So I am pretty amazed at how much I have grown as a teacher these last couple of months. Who would have thought these tiny little humans could have taught me so much!😉 I would like to add I am no Pollyanna when it comes to teaching…I have fucked up and will most probably continue to fuck up at various intervals. Working with kids can sometimes drive you a little batty, and most of what you do is trial and error. (On repeat!) But I am grateful for all the lessons and that I have graciously learnt to appreciate that my failings are simply what makes me human. After this whole experience, a small part of me wonders what I might, one day, be able to learn from those hormone-fueled juveniles out there.
( I’m pretty certain that post is still about 15 or so years away though!😂)