How to Have Meaningful Conversations

Heard, Helped or Hugged?

I’m obsessed with ideas, more than with people.

This is a recipe for for great revision guides, education books, YouTube videos, and department and school-wide solutions.

But, it is a very poor way to connect with people, to understand their desires, or to help them to improve whatever it is they want to improve.

My default thinking tended to be this:

What you want to improve is what you need to improve - students becoming brilliant in your subject.

If that is not what you actually want, why are you even a teacher? I mean, what are for?

It turns out this is not a helpful idea. Who knew?

There are lots of valid reasons for prioritising other aspects of your teaching. After all, the kids will be gone in 5 or 7 years, and your job, who you are and why you turn up each day, will last much longer. I hope.

Over the past 2 years I’ve been trying to learn new ways of thinking about teachers and school leaders which is different from my default.

I’m going to share 3 anecdotes that might help you see what I mean, and maybe use them to have more meaningful working relationships.

Freakonomics and the Power of Podcasts

Steve Levitt is coauthor of Freakonomics and runs a podcast called People I (Mostly) Admire.

He’s interviewing “Charles Duhigg, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and the author of blockbuster bestsellers, including The Power of Habit and Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection.”

Steve confesses that, until he was about 40, he thought every conversation he ever had was about finding a solution to something.

That’s pretty much how I saw most of my professional conversations too … until I was about 55!

Steve also confessed that he thought like that in his conversation with his children (which is kind of shocking, even to me) and this all changed when he decided to have his daughters on his podcast. Charles observes:

When you’re having that conversation with your daughters on the podcast, one of the things that’s happening is that you’re giving yourself permission to ask them questions that you might not ask them if you were just, like, watching TV together.

And you’re also giving them permission to tell you what they want to tell you about their life.

One of the ways that this is used in schools is that teachers are taught if a student comes up and they need to talk to you about something, particularly if they’re upset, ask them:

Do you want to be heard?

Do you want to be helped?

Or do you want to be hugged?

And those are the three kinds of conversations: the practical, emotional, and the social.

At the core of how we communicate is giving each other permission. When we ask a question, we’re giving the other person permission to tell us about who they are.

This strikes me as a brilliant shorthand to understand the other person’s point of view - either student, teacher, leader, friend or family.

It is still shocking to me how few people want to be helped, and so I have to learn this lesson again and again.

Tell Me Your Barriers

Schools tend to invite me in when Ofsted has given them a poor judgement. It is rare for school leaders to want help just to get great progress for their students. Once they are good, or outstanding the emails and phone calls dry up.

The old me would have been disappointed, incredulous: “why are you even a school leader if your main priority isn’t to make students brilliant at your subjects?”

But now I see headship as something of a poisoned chalice: “I get it. Life’s hard, school is harder. There’s so much to be said for good enough.”

When I work in an inadequate or a requires improvement school, my presence is never neutral. My job is just to help, so I feel pretty neutral, but the poor teacher suddenly faced with me can read all sorts of alternative interpretations into their meeting with me.

So, whatever the agenda I’ve been given, I always try to start like this:

Tell me your barriers.

It can be anything - how your students are learning, how the department is running, particular students, your workload - anything at all which is stopping you getting the most our of your job.

I’ll come up with a load of solutions, many of which will be rubbish in your context, and you can ask me about any that interest you. Maybe we’ll find one that works.

You can reject every single one of them. That is not a problem.

This has been transformative.

My favourite so far is a teacher who wanted his TAs to have more impact on the students. Yet he had no time to meet with them and plan how they would help his students.

So, I asked him to picture a student in his class, and tell me all the things he wanted from that student. In a couple of minutes, he listed about 7 things. I wrote them down.

Then I asked him to film me on my phone. I used the list to pretend to be him, making a video for the TA, outlining how much I valued her, and what I wanted her to focus on, and also deliberately not focus on, with that student.

It was a 90 second take. Easy, and incredibly precise. He filmed his own versions for each of the TAs in his classes.

I didn’t arrive with this solution in mind. It was just a logical solution to the barriers we explored.

I now recommend this approach to every SENCO who will listen.

Teachers Tend Not to Think About Learning

Teachers almost never name a barrier which is the rate, depth or mastery of student learning.

I find this fascinating. It is, for me, a litmus test for where we are as a profession.

Every teacher cares about learning in the same way that we all care about climate change.

We desperately want the climate to be kind, and we desperately want the students to learn. But, in the meantime, there’s the day to day madness assailing us from all sides, and at the end of term, I’m booking me that long haul flight outta here…

So, this brings me to conversations with my daughter. Unlike Steve Levitt, we have plenty of real conversations, which work both ways.

She has just started a teacher training role, where she visits lessons of teachers in their first few years’ of teaching, and offers them advice.

‘I hadn’t realised,’ she said, ‘that none of them would think about the students’ learning. I ask them what the students learned in the lesson, and they just don’t know what to say.’

She’s just loads better at it than I am, because actually she doesn’t just give them advice. She’s a psychology graduate. And, let’s face it, she probably has a much better understanding of having meaningful conversations because she’s a woman! And she has a mother who is masterful at this sort of thing.

Anyway, they open up to her and welcome her suggestions because she works out straight away whether they want to be Heard, Helped or Hugged.

If you have a barrier, drop me a comment. I always reply.

If the barrier is about learning, you can jump straight to The Slightly Awesome Teacher in which you see how to apply research to reduce your workload and maximise student progress.

Or, if you are an English teacher, The Full English shows you how to get incredible progress with a lot less work for you and your team.