Help! I’m a Teacher, Not a Therapist: 5 Good Reasons to Read "Teaching the Unteachable" by Marie Delaney
review by Brigitte Mager, Germany
Brigitte Mager has taught languages and literature at various levels, such as secondary education (Abitur / A-levels), university or evening courses for adults. At the moment she is a teacher at a comprehensive school in Berlin Kreuzberg, where the school programme includes the integration of students with special needs (learning disabilities, social or emotional disorders) into regular classes. Brigitte Mager did a summer course with Marie Delaney at PILGRIMS in 2008 and has had a chance to put ideas from “Teaching the Unteachable” into practice since then. E-mail: dbr.mager@web.de
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Introduction
5 good reasons to read “Teaching the Unteachable”
Reference
When I did my teacher training – quite some time ago, that’s true – the focus was on my subjects, the programme, methods, testing and marking plus some good advice like “Keep them busy and they won’t disrupt your classes”. This worked perfectly well as long as I worked in quiet, well-off, sometimes rural neighbourhoods. It didn’t work any longer when I moved and found myself working in a neighbourhood where the students’ life is marked by poverty, broken families, a migratory background, crime, violence, alcohol or drug abuse. All of a sudden I had to deal with students who don’t have breakfast or regular meals, who hang out in the streets, kids with ADHD or those who can’t get through a normal school day without getting stoned, kids who don’t leave the house without a knife for fear of getting mugged up, kids who explode and turn against their fellow students or teachers for no apparent reason ... I could go on, but I think you get the picture. Puberty isn’t helpful either when it comes to sitting down and making an effort to learn, and peer pressure is huge against those who try to do well in class.
As a teacher you feel that at least 20 % of your students should have a teaching assistant, mentor or therapist sitting next to them attending to their special needs. Then the rest of the class would get a chance to settle down to work. Of course this isn’t going to happen and you feel left alone, frustrated, helpless, incompetent and poorly trained to tackle all these problems. When you look around for help, what you find are critical comments from parents, politicians and the media, or movies where heroic teachers smilingly give up everything including their family life in order to save their students, well-meant but often useless training courses, worn-out colleagues who show all the symptoms of stress-related illness and burnout even at a young age. Of course, there are books, good books written by pedagogues, therapists, psychiatrists ... if only you could read them all.
To cut a long story short, here are a few reasons why teachers dealing with difficult students should pick Marie Delaney’s book Teaching the Unteachable.
Reason 1: It’s a practical, real life approach
As a teacher, teacher trainer and educational psychotherapist who has taught regular classes as well as kids excluded from their classes for being unteachable and a risk to other students and staff, Marie Delaney knows exactly what teachers need: not the lengthy theoretical approach, but a small volume (less than 200 pages, come on, that’s doable!) of various ideas and suggestions from different fields, all tried and tested, all closely related to the classroom.
Of course there is always a short theoretical introduction, which is then illustrated by real life examples of student behaviour, followed by “implications for the teacher” and ready to apply conclusions as to what the teacher can actually do. The summary at the end of each chapter will be helpful, if you wish to quickly freshen up your memory later on.
Reason 2: It’s reassuring
One of the key issues in “Teaching the Unteachable” is that teachers mustn’t feel bad about feeling bad. It’s quite a relief to learn that, when you feel frustrated, anxious, irritated, aggressive, helpless or incompetent, it’s not your fault. These feelings are an integral part of the relationship with difficult students, they must be acknowledged and dealt with.
In order to successfully deal with these strong negative emotions, you need help: empathy, competent advice and support, but also new ideas and strategies. “Teaching the Unteachable” helps you to become aware of your own needs and to take care of yourself. You will put down the book with a good feeling, because you and your troubles are taken seriously and yes: you can try quite a few things to improve the situation.
Reason 3: It’s informative
Part of the problem in the classroom is that you don’t know what’s going on with these difficult students and how to react adequately to their unexpected and inexplicable behaviour. Therefore “Teaching the Unteachable” offers you some basic knowledge from psychotherapy about childhood development. It helps the teacher to understand how trauma, loss and neglect affect the children’s development of the brain and their social and emotional skills. It’s especially helpful to learn that there are unconscious defence mechanisms at work and how anybody dealing with these children will be affected by their negative emotions. Once you are aware of phenomena like projection, transference, displacement or splitting, you will be able to manage your own feelings better. You will also react more adequately to your students’ destructive behaviour, if you keep in mind that this is the only way for them to communicate their needs. Strategies like “wondering aloud” or “breaking the pattern” may help to meet these needs.
Of course understanding this doesn’t solve all your problems. That would be too simple. If there was one successful way of dealing with difficult students, there would soon be no difficult student left. But life is more complicated and Marie Delaney’s answer is: If what you do doesn’t work, try something different. She therefore offers the reader a whole bunch of possible approaches.
Reason 4: It’s broad
One might criticize Marie Delaney for staying at the surface, but the book doesn’t want to be exhaustive. (There are, of course, references for further reading, if you wish to dig deeper.) The intention is rather to introduce the teacher to a wide choice of new ideas so that he will, on the whole, think differently about himself and his students and develop a positive, “pro-active” state of mind.
I’ve found it helpful, for example, to know a few basics about attachment theory and how early attachment experiences influence the child’s ability to learn. With the child’s needs in mind you can try to create either a more personal or a rather task-oriented relationship with a student. You will also become aware of the need to reflect and contain the strong emotions created around a student.
One other aspect of early childhood development treated in “Teaching the Unteachable” is play. Children who haven’t had a chance to go through the different developmental stages of play are unable to obey rules, wait their turn, accept group decisions or lose a game. They also haven’t learned to experience the “transitional space” between the adult and the child where learning takes place. Marie Delaney’s book provides you with suggestions for successful, tried and tested classroom games, and they are certainly not a waste of time, even in secondary education.
To complete the picture I will briefly mention some other topics treated in “Teaching the Unteachable”. There is a whole chapter about “Beginnings, transitions and endings”, another one about successful communication – with students, with all those dealing with the students in school and outside and, last but not least, with yourself. There are also ideas for a whole school approach and how to create a supportive emotional climate for staff.
Reason 5: It’s not perfect
Criticism? Of course. You can always find something if you try hard enough. First, the lay-out. For people who like a clear visual structure, all the different indentations, ticks, dots, arrows, bold print, very bold print, italics, small italics etc. do look a bit confusing.
Then, due to the overall structure, the book is a bit repetitive. I found this sometimes useful, because rephrasing and putting things differently may help you to come to a better understanding. Sometimes, however, I found it a bit irritating to come across the same ideas again, so I leave it to the readers to decide for themselves.
Finally I wonder why Marie Delaney goes to such lengths explaining to the reader why adopting a therapist’s point of view might be useful. There’s no need to convince us. After all we are holding the book in our hands, impatient to find out what we can do.
But all this reminds me of one of the most important lessons I’ve learned in this book: there is no need to be perfect in order to do an excellent job. So let’s say that these minor imperfections should not keep anyone from reading “Teaching the Unteachable”. I personally found it absolutely worth reading and useful for the daily work with my still very challenging students.
Delaney, Marie (2009) Teaching the Unteachable, Practical Ideas to Give Teachers Hope and Help When Behaviour Management Strategies Fail, London: Worth Publishing.
Please check the Dealing with Difficult Learners course at Pilgrims website.
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