From my very first experience of ‘Teaching Practice’ as a student teacher, I learned that it was very important to maintain ‘control’ of the class.

In fact, my biggest fear as a student teacher was ‘losing control’ of my class while being observed.

And while the language of ‘Teaching Practice’ has moved on, and the word inspector has been replaced by mentor or tutor, I wonder about whether the perception of control as good classroom management has enjoyed such a transformation.

Teaching children with specific learning needs taught me a lot about letting go of ‘control’. Mainly because, quite simply – I no longer had it, or whatever I thought ‘it’ was. The things that had worked for me in terms of classroom management, no longer worked. And the more I tried to hang on to ‘control’, the more resistance I faced, and the more ‘out of control’ things became.

In the mainstream classroom setting, I had unconsciously exerted my control on learners who were more passive or obliging in terms of their responses, without any major pushback. I could tell the class with little consideration that an activity was finished now, and to put down their pencils. To ‘line up’ for yard time, or to hang up their coats. Demand after demand, with little or no need to consider the impact on the learners.

Until of course, I tried to give those same instructions in an alternative context, with learners with alternative needs.

I was reminded of this personal tug-of-war over making demands recently when I observed a teacher working with a most vulnerable cohort of young people. Young people with very specific and significant emotional and behavioural needs, as well as additional learning needs.  And I watched in wonder, as the teacher delivered a master class in ‘letting go of control’.

She began by so skilfully and so gently introducing a piece of work to a learner who found it very difficult to tolerate demands. The learner felt challenged by this and pushed-back repeatedly – demanding that the teacher write the responses for them, that the teacher pick up items dropped to the floor, that the teacher continue reading the text. And the teacher met those ‘demands’. Because in her own mind she had reframed them as ‘needs’. And needs they are.

In doing so, the lesson continued, and the lesson happened. What could have ended up as a lesson abandoned, a trip to the principal’s office, or exclusion from the classroom ended up with the learner reading, writing, communicating and even laughing and smiling in moments.

All because the teacher was able to resist the temptation to say ‘I am the teacher here, this is my classroom, these are my rules’. All because the teacher was able to leave those societal ideas and perceptions of ‘the teacher’ as someone always in control outside the door. To resist the urge to ‘go to war’ about any number of behaviours, and to instead stay focused on the real purpose of this lesson – to keep the learner engaged. To keep the learner learning.

The teacher was able to let this 17-year old learner ‘win’, because she understood all too well that he wasn’t winning. In fact, he had all the odds stacked against him since he was brought into this world. In his young life, he had already lost so much, and was still losing.

It is not easy, that is for certain. And with increasing numbers of learners in classrooms, and increasing levels of need, this idea of ‘letting go of control’ and meeting each specific and individual need is even more challenging. But I left that observation wondering why it had taken this learner to get to this point of exclusion from the mainstream education system to meet a teacher who was able and willing to ‘let go of control’?

Schools are systems, bound by rules and regulations. That, I understand. But for those learners who cannot succeed within those rule-bound structures, for reasons that may be physiological, biological, or environmental – perhaps they would be better served by a ‘letting go of control’ approach being taken before they fail. Before they are excluded from the system. And not after.