Latest / The Thriving School Podcast with Jenni Awesome / Our Students Aren’t Broken: What Their Behavior Reveals About Our Schools
Transcript
- Jenni Awesome: What if our students aren't broken? Seriously. What if they aren't too lazy, too disrespectful, too distracted, too sensitive, too unmotivated? Too addicted to their phones. Too difficult, too far behind. What if some of the things we're identifying as problems with students are actually information about our schools? Information about our systems. Our relationships, expectations, the classrooms, our schedules, our interventions, our cultures. Our students are constantly giving us data. But the question is: are we listening? I've spent nearly two decades in education as a classroom teacher, curriculum specialist, student services professional, assistant principal, principal, and school leader. And I've sat across from a lot of students who had already developed a story about themselves. I'm the bad kid. I'm stupid. The teachers don't like me. I'm always in trouble. I'm not any good at school. I'm never gonna graduate, anyways. And every time I hear a student say something like that, I wonder who taught them that? Where did this idea come from? Because students don't walk into kindergarten believing they're bad at school. Somewhere along the line, they picked it up and they learned it. And sometimes, without intending to, the very systems we've designed to help students succeed become the places where students begin believing there is something wrong with them. Today I want to challenge that. Not by pretending behavior doesn't matter, because it does, and not by removing consequences, because in every choice there is a natural consequence. And not by blaming teachers, because they're not the only ones there. And definitely not by piling one more responsibility onto already exhausted principals. They have enough going on. Instead, I want us to ask a question that thriving schools are willing to ask. What if the student isn't the problem we're supposed to solve? What if the behavior is information we can use to build a better system? Welcome to the Thriving School podcast. I'm Jenni, Awesome. This is a podcast for school leaders who are tired of spending every day putting out fires and are ready to build schools where students thrive, teachers thrive, and leaders can thrive too. We're going to talk honestly about behavior, belonging, school culture, teacher burnout, leadership, attendance, MTSS, systems, families, failure, and what actually happens when the beautiful plans we put on paper meet real students, real teachers, and real schools on Monday morning. Because thriving schools don't happen by accident. We intentionally build them. And today we're starting off with one of the most important shifts we can make. Our students are not broken. If you've ever sat in an MTSS meeting, so multi-tiered systems of support meeting, you've probably heard some version of this conversation. Well, he just doesn't care. And she refuses to do anything. We have tried everything. Well, mom won't answer the phone. He is failing four classes. She is constantly on her phone. He has absolutely no motivation. She doesn't respect adults. And listen, I understand those conversations. I've participated in them. I've had quite a few of them. When you're dealing with hundreds of students, limited resources, staffing shortages, behavior incidents, attendance problems, parent phone calls, teacher frustration, and everything else happening inside a school, it becomes incredibly easy to locate the problem in the student. But I want us to notice something. We start with behavior. Marcus isn't completing assignments. And then we turn that into we and then we turn that behavior into an identity. Marcus is unmotivated. Those are not the same statement. The first is observable, the second is an interpretation. And once we've decided Marcus is unmotivated, we start building interventions around our interpretation. And what if we're wrong? Maybe Marcus doesn't understand the work. Maybe he's embarrassed to ask. Maybe he missed 27 days of school and has no idea where to begin. Maybe he reads three grade levels below the material. Maybe there's something going on at home. Maybe he's learned that trying and failing feels worse than refusing to try. Maybe the work feels completely irrelevant to him. Or yes, maybe Marcus genuinely doesn't want to do it. And that's possible too. But we don't know until we get curious. Thriving schools get curious before they get punitive. Before we keep going, if this conversation is resonating with you, take a second to like this episode and subscribe to the Thriving School podcast. It may seem like a small thing, but every like, subscription, comment, and share helps this conversation reach another educator or school leader who might need it. And I just don't want you fli and I don't just want you listening. I want you in the conversation. So when someone So when something makes you think, yes, this is exactly what we're dealing with, or even, Jenni,, I completely disagree with you. Come tell me. Leave a comment, send me a message @msjenniferawesome, share the episode with your leadership team. Because thriving schools aren't going to be built by one person with all the answers. They're going to be built by people willing to learn from each other. Alright, let's keep going. Imagine planting a hundred flowers and seventy begin wilting. Would you walk through the garden saying, flowers these days? They just don't have grit anymore. When I was a seedling, we stood up straight. Of course not. You'd investigate the environment. What's happening with the soil? The water? The sunlight? Temperature? Is there a disease? What change? What dog peed in my in my flowers? And yet, sometimes when large numbers of students struggle, our response is to create increasingly sophisticated ways of identifying what's wrong with individual students. But if the same problem keeps appearing across dozens or hundreds of students, that's not just student data anymore. That's systems data. If 40% of your students are chronically absent, you don't have 40% of students who individually developed an attendance problem. You have a school problem worth investigating. If teachers are writing hundreds of referrals for the same three behaviors, well, that's information. If ninth graders are disproportionately failing, that's information. If one teacher rarely sends students out while another teacher teaching similar students sends several students every day, that's also information, not ammunition. Information. Thriving schools become incredibly curious about patterns. And you've probably heard behavior is communication. I've said it a couple times. But sometimes that phrase gets misunderstood. Understanding behavior does not mean accepting every behavior. A student can be hurting and still be responsible for hurting someone else. Hurt people, hurt people. A student can have trauma and still need boundaries. A student can be dysregulated and still need to repair harm. We can say, I understand why this happened, and this cannot continue. At the same time. That's relationship-centered discipline. It's not do whatever you want. It's you matter too much for me to pretend your choices don't matter. And that's a much higher expectation. Here's a tiny shift that completely changes a conversation. Instead of beginning with, why did you do that? Let's try what happened. I've used this again and again with students. What happened? And then listen. Not because the student's voice automatically becomes fact, not because there won't be consequences. You're gathering information, then, who was affected? then what needs to happen now. And eventually, what do we need to do differently next time? Notice what we've done. We've moved discipline from rule, violation, and punishment to event, understanding, accountability, repair, and learning. And those are two completely different systems. One leads us to the school to prison pipeline. The other one helps us to create people who will be able to function in our society in the real world. School leaders know this student, the one with their head down. No work, 20 missing assignments, and you ask, don't you want to graduate? They shrug. I don't care. It's tempting to believe them, but I've learned to become curious because sometimes I don't care is safer than saying I don't think I can. Think about that. How many times would you rather say I don't care than I don't know that I can? If I try and fail, I might discover I'm not capable. But if I refuse to try, I control the failure. If I say this class is stupid, I don't have to say this class makes me feel stupid. Those are very different statements. And this is where belonging becomes instructional. Because when a student trusts an adult enough to say what's really happening, we finally have information that we can use. And this is one of the biggest misconceptions I want to challenge through the Tri the Thriving School podcast. Belonging isn't extra. It's not woo-woo. It's not pizza parties, posters, spirit weeks, high fives. Those things are all great. And belonging is much deeper. Belonging answers: do I matter here? Does anyone notice when I'm gone? Does anyone believe I'm capable? Is there something I can contribute? Can I make a mistake without losing my place in this community? And this is why I keep saying belonging is not the bonus, it's the foundation. Because students who belong are more willing to take risks. Students who take risks are willing to try. Students who try will sometimes fail. Students who can fail safely can learn. And students who learn can grow. So we get belonging, safety, risk, failure, learning, and growth. And that's not fluffy, that's quite literally school improvement. Here's another distinction thriving schools make. Accountability is not humiliation. Accountability says that you made a choice, this was the impact. You have responsibility. Now let's repair it. Shame, on the other hand, says this is who you are. And shame is incredibly ineffective if our actual goal is behavioral change. Because if I'm already the bad kid, why would I behave differently? But if you tell me this isn't who I believe you are. Now you've created cognitive dissonance. You're inviting me towards something, and that's leadership. Now this might be uncomfortable, but I want principals to consider it. How much of our intervention system is built around fixing the kid? Student isn't succeeding. Intervention. Still isn't succeeding. Another intervention. A behavior plan. An attendance contract. A check-in checkout. A referral. A meeting. Another meeting. Another meeting. Do you want to go to another meeting? I don't think they want to go to another meeting either. And sometimes those interventions are exactly what's needed. But I want another column on the multi-tiered system of support form. What are we going to change? Not only what will the student do, what will the adults do? What can change in the classroom? What can change in the school? What barrier can we remove? What relationship gets to be strengthened? What skill gets explicitly taught? What expectation isn't clear? And what system isn't currently working for this student and maybe others? And that's where MTSS becomes transformational instead of simply becoming another system for documenting student failure. This is exactly why I've been developing the Thrive approach to school improvement. Because thriving schools aren't built by fixing one isolated problem at a time. Everything is connected. Culture affects behavior. Behavior affects teacher morale. Teacher morale affects instruction. Instruction affects engagement. Engagement affects attendance. And attendance affects achievement. Achievement affects our confidence, and our confidence affects our behaviors. And around and around we go. So instead of constantly reaching to systems, we need school leaders who can step back and ask, what is the system telling us? that's what we're going to explore together throughout this podcast. And it's the work we're going to do inside the Thriving School Reset. Not another improvement plan that ends up sitting on a Google Drive somewhere. A practical 90-day blueprint that you can actually implement. So, if you're interested in learning more about the Thriving School reset, I'll provide that information in the comments. So here's your challenge for this week: choose one recurring student problem in your school. Not one student, a pattern. Maybe it's hallway behavior, phones, tardiness, chronic absenteeism, freshman failure, sophomore failures. Lunch behavior, disrespect, skipping, missing assignments, teaching referrals. Then ask your team five questions. What is actually happening? Only observable facts. When and where is it happening? Look for patterns. When is it not happening? This question is incredibly powerful because exceptions tell us something. What are students telling us? No, actually go ask them. What could we change? Not forever. Not district wise. One small experiment. Try it. Collect information. Learn. Adjust. Fail forward. And that's how thriving systems are built. school leaders, your students are not. Problems to manage. Their people were preparing to inherit the world. And yes, they get boundaries, they get consequences, they get expectations, and they get adults willing to say no. But they also need adults willing to ask, why? They need adults who refuse to confuse accountability with rejection. They need schools where failure isn't fatal, where mistakes create opportunities for learning, where students are known, where teachers are supported, where principals aren't expected to personally hold together systems that aren't working, because here's what I've learned. Struggling people cannot indefinitely sustain thriving systems. We need students who thrive, teachers who thrive, families who feel connected, and leaders who can actually lead instead of spending every waking minute reacting. And that's the school we're building. Not perfect schools, thriving schools. Thank you for joining me on the Thriving School Podcast. I'm Jenni, Awesome. If something in today's episode made you immediately think, my gosh, that's my school, I want to hear about it. Come find me @msjenniferawesome and tell me what's one recurring problem in your school that you're ready to stop putting a band-aid on? And if you're a principal or a school leader who is ready to move from consistently reacting Intentionally building, make sure you're connected with me through Awesome Consulting and Educational Services. Join me at Awesomeconsulting.org/subscribe.. Because we're going to keep getting practical about how we build schools where students thrive, teachers thrive, and leaders thrive. And remember, when something isn't working, that doesn't mean you failed. It means you've learned something. So get curious. Make the adjustments. Fail forward and keep building. Because thriving schools don't happen by accident. We build them. I'm Jenni, Awesome, and this is the Thriving School Podcast. I'll see you next time.