I vividly remember the relief in Matilda’s voice.
It was not the kind of relief that comes with a problem being solved. It was relief from finally being believed about how big the problem was.
She’d pulled me aside after a coaching session, looked at me and said quietly, “I thought I was stuffing this whole teaching thing up. It turns out I was just alone.”
She’d been carrying one student for the better part of two years. The same child, behaviours and cycle of explosions, removals, repairs, fresh starts and repeated apologies that neither really believed in anymore.
Matilda was seriously skilled, genuinely caring and utterly exhausted. She’d tried everything a good teacher tries: behaviour plans, adjustments, relationship-building, staying back, beginning each morning with a clean slate.
What she didn’t have – what nobody had thought to give her – was a team around her that responded the same way she did. When she held a line, others bent it. When she asked for calm language, someone else escalated the situation. She wasn’t swimming against the student. She was swimming against the tide of her own school’s inconsistency.
The turning point didn’t come from a new strategy. It came from shared ownership.
Matilda’s team and leaders stopped making well-meaning suggestions about how she might manage him better and started agreeing on how they would all respond together through the same language, expectations and follow-through. By no means was it a perfect system, but it was a more consistent one. And the difference, once it took hold, was almost immediate.
What changed first wasn’t the student. It wasn’t even Matilda. It was the staff as a whole.
I then watched Matilda’s shoulders drop when she was teaching. Her tone softened in a way that can’t be faked. She stopped bracing herself every time her student walked in. And the student, as students always do, felt it straight away – less testing of moving boundaries, fewer spikes and now shorter recoveries. His behaviour didn’t change overnight. It gradually improved because it no longer had a single person to push against. Behaviour that can wedge itself between one teacher and the rest of a school is a very different animal to behaviour that meets the same calm wall wherever it turns.
This is what I keep coming back to: when a student’s behaviour belongs to one teacher, it becomes personal and it becomes unbearably heavy.
When it belongs to the whole team, it becomes something closer to manageable. Students know if the limits they encounter are one person’s individual preference, or reflect something the whole school has agreed on. They test the seams. And if those seams give way, they pull even harder.
If a student’s behaviour only improves in one classroom, that’s not a success story. It’s a warning sign worth paying attention to. Real improvement arrives when the same calm, the same limits and the same care follow the student wherever they go across a school day.
No teacher should have to carry a child alone. And no child should have to figure out, through a series of painful experiments, which adults they’re allowed to fall apart with or play up with – and which ones they’re not.
Keep fighting that good fight,
P.S. No teacher should have to carry difficult behaviour alone. That’s a big focus of The Building Better People Project, which I’m running in cities across Australia and New Zealand over the coming months.
If you can’t join me in person, there’s also an online workshop on Wednesday 19 August.
Find your location and register for The Building Better People Project here.
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