“If you want better results, then forget about setting goals. Focus on your system instead.” - James Clear, Atomic Habits
I long believed working with kids was a simple matter of cause and effect.
By the end of my teaching career, I'd discovered it wasn't quite that easy. Fortunately, children are patient with adults, as we learn. The confidence I'd gained as a teacher helped me, to help kids. Then I started in middle school. That's when the learning started all over. I'd quickly found that working with adolescents was far different from working with children.
Middle School isn't easy. Not for adolescents not for adults.
You understand this, if you're a "middle school person". Approaching working in middle school with a mindset or expectation that it's easy will lead to frustration. It may result in frustration and eventually, burnout. Frustrated adults can't help students, help themselves. Accepting this as challenging work will reveal the riches of working with adolescents. They may seem small, easy to overlook, and even insignificant. They're not. They're the secret to an adolescent's success, and the secret to middle school educators' joy.
Student success fuels adult joy. And joyous adults deliver adolescents to success. But how?
Start small.
This is often a difficult concept...for adults. We allow ourselves to multi-task, have convinced ourselves that being "busy" and "productive" are the same. And we push through stress, disregarding signals telling us to pause for self-care. Apply this to kids, and failure will result.
Approaching middle school with this mindset of "getting things done" or worse, "getting work done", will only lead to failure. Instead, get to know each adolescent on an individual basis. Building trust will shift the conversation towards how an adolescent views his/her personalized points of pride, challenges, and even aspirations. When we learn about each student, we can help each student step onto the path towards success. Starting small, one two-minute exchange at a time, with each adolescent, will lead to big results. Don't rush it.
“When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that last blow that did it—but all that had gone before.” - James Clear, Atomic Habits
Keep it simple.
It doesn't take long working with adolescents to see the direct impact of executive functioning skills. Knowing what this looks like is easy. Understanding why it's important is critical. While brain research is extensive, making time to learn about the prefrontal cortex helps put things in perspective. This part of the brain is key to the majority of challenges we frequently see: organization, time management, prioritizing, and cause-and-effect (which we know as "act first, think second"). Identifying one small focus area (for example, remembering to pack the school bag the night before, and position it next to the front door), keeps focus on "the main thing". Seeing a student who has come to school prepared this to school leads to opportunities to praise their efforts, and to reinforce the habit. Investing time in helping a student add a component such as a physical calendar, will enable a student to cross days crossed out as the habit is building. Daily repetition that is visual, actionable, and personal, will help transfer responsibility from the adult to the adolescent.
Look for "habit stacking" opportunities. Resist the urge to start too soon.
Busy adults are used to employing "to-do" lists, full of unrelated tasks, that just have to get done. It's important for an adolescent to remain focused on building one habit. In the backpack example, while it may seem logical to add Remember: lunch, devices, musical instruments, and athletics equipment, like a "to-do" list, don't do it! This will split an adolescent's attention, erode confidence, create setbacks, and result in failure of the primary habit being built. Rather, as the adolescent grows in autonomy and confidence, the adult can begin to identify aspects of the routine where habits may be stacked, eventually.
No, middle school isn't easy, and that truth goes for all parties involved. But adults can help. Being willing to start small and slow, to get to know kids, to understand adolescent development, and to resist the urge to rush or advance too soon makes all the difference.
Easy. Right?
This is part four of a ten-part blog series, based on the book, Atomic Habits by James Clear.