When we lived in tribes, as a child started into early adulthood and pushed against the safety & boundaries of the village, they were invited to explore the wilderness, to make mistakes and learn to survive on their own. Some teens might have been cautious and not ventured too far whilst others needed to understand their own capacity for risk and adventure. Eventually, they developed resilience, commitment, self-awareness and understood their place in the pack. By venturing out on their own, being encouraged to explore, learn and fail, they would begin to recognise their skills, strengths and the value they had to offer others. With that would come pride and a greater sense of belonging.
If you’ve ever been part of a sports team you’ll recognise this feeling – that of knowing your place and role as part of a collective moving towards a collaborative goal. It creates self-esteem to know who you are and what you have to offer others.
- So how comes we don’t teach this stuff?
- Why are we more concerned with teenagers conforming than risk-taking?
- What are the benefits and problems with keeping our kids close?
- And what can we actively do to nurture self discovery in our adolescents?
Teaching Self Discovery
The current doctrine is that we don’t have time for this stuff within school. There is such an obsession with standardised tests and the acquisition of knowledge that ‘who am I?’ as an evolving topic of exploration is never, or rarely covered. Conversely, there is not a demand for teachers who are skilled in such a pedagogy and certainly not any formal teacher training in emotional intelligence or personal development. Schools I’ve worked in tend to focus on Maths, English and Science, then the EBacc subjects, followed by those which have a qualification attached to them (GCSE, BTEC, A Level, T Level etc). PSHE lessons are considered a bolt-on, or tick-box for Ofsted, and in some instances the subject was taken off the timetable all together and considered part of Form Time.
Perhaps there is a belief that character development befalls the duties of home-life, and one would hope that questions about future ambition are asked at the dinner table alongside ‘how are you getting on in Maths’, but should we expect that to be enough?
It’s widely covered in research that learning styles, personal development and emotional regulation all impact greatly on cognition because when someone knows who they are, what they’re aiming for and has an idea about how to get there, they develop greater resilience. Self awareness is a form of integration, which means someone is able to reflect on their experience and grow circuits within their brain which link widely separated areas to one another. Not only does this create balance within their nervous system, it also impacts on their relationships and ability to create links in their academic work as well. As a teenagers’ brain is growing, it is also trimming the neurological links that it makes, so when a pathway is used a lot it becomes stronger or when it stops being used, it withers. In short, improved personal development and self-reflection skills creates better all-round students, but we focus so much on their output (grades and exam results) that we forget or ignore the other stuff.
Imagine if teachers were gourmet chefs. They’d be forgiven for focussing on the balance of flavours, the presentation, how well they’ve cooked each part, but what they’ve neglected is the ingredients themselves – where they’re grown, whether they’re ripe or organic. The meal will still taste brilliant because they’re an excellent chef who works hard and knows their stuff, but it could be outstanding if the raw materials they were using were packed of even more flavour.
Behaviour Management
We are also obsessed with teenagers behaving themselves and having the correct attitude to learning, rather than feeling self-expressed and engaged. Again, it’s a race against time, we’re packing them into class sizes of 30-35 and still trying to make learning fun and engaging, yet also keeping to a specific syllabus. When we prioritise the wellbeing of students and ask them to reflect on what they’re doing and why they’re doing it, their capacity for learning increases. It’s all about integration.
Trauma Informed Schools are a fantastic example of recognising behaviour as communication and we can go even further in offering teachers the skills to enhance their practice in the classroom through their own self knowledge.
Teenagers who are able to reflect on their own experience can also make better decision and assess risk, but often it’s about taking risks and getting it wrong in order to learn the necessary lessons for growing up. I think when you spend years working with teenagers and watching them make the same mistakes over and over again you start to see them all as one person and run the risk of getting frustrated that they keep making the same mistake. As a witnessing adult it stops being novel, but we do well to remember that to the individual it is a completely unique experience and chance to learn. The best teachers I’ve worked with are the ones who will happily sit in their own Groundhog Day because they know it’s only the first (or sometimes second) time that particular student has visited.
It’s easier for us as the educators responsible for hundreds of children if they conform to our rules and guidance, but when they don’t it’s because their actual role in society is to test, challenge and provoke change. That’s how we’ve evolved this far – because teenagers saw a problem with the way the adults were doing things and then grew up to find ways of fixing it.
Safety first
The current culture is obsessed with keeping children close in order to keep them safe, and it makes perfect sense because we’ve acquired so many stories of the various ways it can go wrong. How many times have you scrolled through social media videos of near-misses? And it’s even worse to be the adult on duty when something bad happens. But we must get better as adults at being kind to ourselves when bad stuff does happen on our watch. Otherwise we prevent our kids from making mistakes, from experiencing disappointment and heartache, and from learning how to avoid it in the future. Our instinct is to protect but in this modern era, what are we actually protecting them from? I find it ironic that we’re not talking about protecting them from dopamine addictions by giving them smartphones as early as 10 years old, but playing outside is dangerous.
The benefit is that we can see them and we know they’re come to no physical danger, but the research is growing in it’s unanimous conclusion that we’re doing more damage to their mental health instead. Our teens aren’t having a mental health crisis. They’re responding in a perfectly natural way to a crisis causing issues with mental health. According to thousands of years of evolution, the modern lifestyle is an unnatural way of living, yet we’re still trying to battle our instincts and most of the time we’re losing.
Nurturing Self-discovery
Something I talk about on the webinar series, From Fear to Fulfilment, is the skill of paying attention to our experience. I give some very clearn tips on how to do it because some of us find it easier than others but hopefully I’ve explained in this post why it’s so fundamental to our success. It leads to greater integration, which help bolster strong thinking skills. So reflective, self aware individuals become better learners.
School spends a lot of time training and developing the left hemisphere of the brain, responsible for logic, language, linear and lateral thinking, and hardly any time at all actively developing autobiographical facets of the right side. Our instincts and intuition. Yet it’s our ability to look inward that drives so many of the skills we want to see from students – creative thinking, self-motivation, or emotional regulation. We’ve built an education system that’s ‘left-side dominant’ because it’s easier to track, collect data and make judgements about. It’s not what’s best for educating a well-rounded, coordinated young person. And I see it in some of the young people I work with who can use their language skills to describe how to code a game, answer a maths problem or recite stories from history, but they struggle to tell stories about themself, and to share a commentary on their lived experience because they simply don’t get asked to, unless they’re being told off for doing something wrong. “What did you do and why did you do it?”
What’s happening at Morphise is that young people are being encouraged to activate both hemispheres of the brain, to learn to organise their thoughts, to reflect on their lived experience and then tell stories about what’s happening for them in such a way that they understand and can make personalised and informed choices.
Sign up for the webinar, From Fear to Fulfilment, to learn more. Share this article with someone you think would benefit from or enjoy reading it, and of course, reach out if you have something you’d like to discuss.