Plot Twist: It's Series 1.5 - The Fight to Belong: The why behind the THRIVE framework...

The student who fights you and the student who disappears into silence are doing the same thing. They are both telling you they don't yet belong here fully enough to risk genuine learning. In this episode, Kurt draws on thirty years of observation — from the babies room in long day care to Year 6 in primary school — to make the case that every disruptive behaviour, every act of resistance, and every quiet withdrawal in a classroom comes from the same place: a need to be seen, heard, recognised, and to belong. He shares the story of a student who fought every morning — and what slowly happened when the fight stopped being rewarded. And he introduces the philosophical argument that Becoming only happens through Belonging — and that both can be designed for.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

We're taking a step back from flow this episode, and we're going to look at how the student who fights you and the student who disappears into silence are doing the same thing. They're both telling you that they don't yet belong here. They're not ready to fully risk genuine learning. And once you see that, you can't unsee it. And it changes everything about how you design a classroom. Ah, g'day! Fancy bumping into you here. Just one quick thing before we get started. If you find yourself nodding along, pausing to think, or sharing this with a colleague, that's what this podcast is all about. If you do enjoy it, feel free to share it, leave a review, or subscribe where you get your podcasts. It genuinely helps more people find the work and lets me know what's resonating. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. I always appreciate hearing your thoughts and reflections. And if something here really lands and you feel like shouting me a coffee, there's a link in the show notes. Alright, let's get into it. It's me Kurt, and this is my podcast, the Grow Your Flow and Glow Podcast series 1.5. The messy research leading to season two. Here's a quick note for listeners. This episode includes reflection on behaviour, trauma, and the emotional experience of schooling across the settings from early childhood to primary school. It is offered as a professional and human reflection, not a clinical framework or a behaviour management prescription. So I want to start today's episode with an observation. Not a theory, not a framework, which we've already started looking at. Just an observation that I've made across my 20 plus years of working in education. From the baby's room in long daycare all the way to year six in primary school, across low socioeconomic communities and high pressure multicultural schools, across classrooms and staff rooms and parent meetings and playgrounds. Here it is. Every behavior that worries us in a school setting, the disruption, the defiance, the aggression, the withdrawal, the silence, the refusal to start, every single one of them comes from the same place. It's a need to be seen, a need to be heard, a need to be recognized, and a need to belong. That is not a soft idea, and that is not a pastoral care platitude. That is twenty plus years of watching human beings, babies, toddlers, eight-year-olds, eleven-year-olds, teachers, carers, all doing versions of the same thing, all finding different ways to answer the same unspoken question. Do I belong here? And what I want to argue in this episode is something that I think most behaviour management frameworks miss entirely. The students who fight you, who looks for a battle every morning, who escalates until you send them out, who belongs to the disruption because the disruption is the only belonging available to them. And the student who disappears, who goes so quiet you forget they're there, who completely just enough sits quietly enough to avoid your attention, who has learned that invisibility is safer than visibility. You see, those two students are not doing different things. I believe they're doing the same thing. They are both trying to become someone in an environment that hasn't yet made that possible. Let me tell you about a student I taught when I was working as a temporary teacher in a low socioeconomic school. This child was a constant disruption. Every lesson, every day, the same pattern. He would arrive looking for a fight. Not a physical fight, but a contest, and he wanted to challenge me, to test whether I would react, to find the edge of my patience and push past it. And he found that the most reliable way to escape the work, the work that made him feel exposed or incomplete, was to get sent out of the room. Pick a fight big enough, get removed, and suddenly you don't have to demonstrate what you can do. Most teachers understandably sent him out, and every time they did he learned something. He learned that disruption works, and that is a reliable technology for avoiding things that feel most threatening. Being asked to learn in a public place and failing. I was one of the only temporary teachers who kept him in class. Not because I had a sophisticated behavior management plan, not because I had read the right research, but because I recognized something in him that I recognized in myself. He wasn't bad, he wasn't defiant, he was just terrified. And the fight was his way of staying safe. So what I did was simple. When his behavior escalated, when the provocation started, when the noise and the challenge and the performance wrapped up, I let the water roll off my back. That was hard. I just thought to myself, I'm not buying into this now, and I just kept teaching. I turned back to the students who are engaged in the work, and I kept the energy of the room focused on the learning, not on him. I didn't ignore him, I stayed very aware of him, and I checked in quietly when there was space. But I refused to give the disruption what it was asking for, which is my full attention, my reaction, and the drama of a confrontation. And eventually, not overnight, not in a week, not in any way that made a good story at the time, but that student started to watch. He watched his peers engaging, he watched discussions happening that he was not a part of, he watched moments of genuine thinking and laughter and connection, then he realized that he was missing these. All because he was outside the learning and not inside it. And slowly, slowly, he started to edge in. First was just a comment, then a question that was and he was genuinely curious rather than provocative. And then there was a moment where he got something right, and I named it. Quietly, specifically, without making a performance of it, and then something shifted in his face. He had been seen, and it was for the right reason, and it was for the first time, possibly, in that room. Over time he became an active, engaged member of the class, and he found belonging through the learning, through the discussions, the shared thinking, the small successes, in a way that the disruption had never actually given him. The disruption had given him attention. This gave him recognition, and those are not the same thing. Now I need to say something that I think matters more than the success story. I was lucky that it worked. It could have gone the other way. A student carrying enough unmet need, enough historical evidence that adults cannot be trusted, and enough trauma, well, that student may not have been ready to respond. They may have escalated further, and they may have pulled others into the disruption rather than edging towards the learning. And I want to name that honestly because thrive is not a formula. Becoming by design is not a guarantee. You can create the best classroom, the best conditions, the best environment in the world. And a student who is not yet ready to risk belonging through learning may need more time, more support, more professional expertise than a classroom teacher alone can provide. The humility in that acknowledgement is not weakness. It's what makes a framework trustworthy rather than naive. So becoming by design is not a guarantee. It is a design philosophy that dramatically increases the probability of genuine learning and that honors the irreducible complexity of human beings who are not always ready and who are not always safe enough to risk it yet. There is something else I want to name about that classroom. Something I've observed in every setting I've ever worked in. When a student like that one is disrupting consistently, there are often other students watching. Students who are not yet committed to the disruption, but they're circling it. They're testing whether to join in. And sometimes, not always, but sometimes they do. They follow, they amplify, and the disruption becomes collective. And if you watch that moment carefully, if you watch what is happening for those students who follow, not just the one who leads, you see something very important. They are not joining because they want chaos. They are not joining because they are bad. They are joining because the disruption is offering them something the learning has not. And that's a sense of belonging. Together in the disruption, they feel connected. They feel seen by each other. They feel part of something. They have found a community. Not the learning community the classroom was designed to be, but a community nonetheless. Built from a shared disconnection, from the work, from the environment, or from the learning space. They belong to each other because they feel they don't belong to the learning. And this is where I want to bring in an idea that completely changed how I understand behavior. The student who fights and the student who follows and the student who disappears, they're all doing the same thing. They are all trying to find a way to become someone in the space available to them. You see, the fight is becoming. Following is becoming. The silence is becoming. Just not the kind of becoming the classroom was designed for. Disruptive behaviour is not the absence of becoming. It is becoming happening in the wrong direction. Toward the only community, the only recognition, the only sense of self available in that moment. So becoming is a process. And let's look at the theory without all the jargon. In 2014, there were two Australian researchers, Carly Pierce and Marilyn Flair, and they published a paper that I want to talk about today. Not because it's obscure academic writing, it isn't, but because it contains an idea that I think educators need more than almost any other idea in our current reform conversation. Their argument is this belonging and becoming is not separate ideas. They are two halves of the same process, and you cannot have one without the other. Here is how I think about it. So belonging gives you the ground, the stability, the sense that you are known here, that who you are has a place here, and that it is safe enough to be yourself. Without that ground, without genuine belonging, genuine learning is not possible. Because learning requires risk, and risk requires safety. But here's the part that doesn't get said enough. Belonging alone is not enough. If a student only ever belongs in spaces where they are never challenged, where difference is smoothed over, where the work never pushes past what is already comfortable, something important stops. They just stop becoming. Thrive is not written from theory down to classroom. It is written from 20 plus years of experience watching human human beings from babies all the way to U6 students, to teachers, to parents, and to carers, all doing the same thing. All displaying behaviors, disruptive or withdrawn, or compliant or curious, that come from the same place. A need to be seen, heard, and recognized, and to belong. And it is written by someone who has observed that need not just in schools, but in every human context, in sales teams, in business communities, in families, and in staff rooms. The fundamental drive to belong and to become someone through that belonging is not a school problem, it's a human condition. What Thrive tries to do is design that condition deliberately in every classroom. So T, trust and belonging. This comes first because without it nothing else is possible. Not as a warm-up, not as a pastoral nicety before the real work begins, but as the structural prerequisite for any genuine learning. A student who does not yet trust the environment, who is spending cognitive and emotional energy scanning for threat, reading the room for safety, managing the risk of being exposed. Well that student can't be in flow. They can't be in the productive tension of becoming. Their nervous system is doing a different job. Trust is the ground. Everything else it's built on it. Next is High Expectations with meaning. This is where becoming requires something beyond safety. It requires the encounter with difficulty, with something genuinely beyond current capability. High expectations without meaning is just pressure, and we have talked in earlier episodes about what pressure does. It produces compliance at best, resistance at worst, and belonging through the disruption as it's most honest. High expectations with meaning is something different. It says I believe that you are capable of more than what you are. And here is why that really matters more than anything. Not for a test, not for a rank, but for the actual life. The combination aspiration plus purpose is the invitation to becoming. Next is R, which is relevance and purpose. Becoming requires a reason. The dialectical tension between genuine learning, the encounter with difficulty, the disruption of current understanding, is only sustainable when it is in the service of something the student actually cares about. Relevance is not just engagement bait. It is the bridge between the curriculum and the student's actual identity. When learning connects to a student's life, their community, their questions, and their experience, the difficulty becomes meaningful rather than arbitrary or boring. And meaningful difficulty is something that human beings will push through. Arbitrary difficulty, well, difficulty in service of nothing the students can identify produces exactly the behaviors we've been discussing. You know, that resistance or the escape or belonging through disruption. And that's what we want to avoid. I is identity and narrative. This is the element that I think is most distinctive to Thrive. Most frameworks treat identity as a background condition, something students bring with them that learning works on. Thrive, well, it treats identity as a design variable, something the teachers actively shape through every interaction and every piece of feedback, every decision. About whose knowledge is valued and whose voice gets followed. You see, the student that fought me every morning had a very clear identity narrative. He was someone who couldn't do the work, who got sent out, who belonged to the disruption. You see, that narrative was not his fault. It had been written by a series of experiences and responses in schools, at home, or in his community, that had accumulated into something he had no language to question. So what shifted slowly and imperfectly was the narrative. He got something right. I named it, not with fanfare, just quietly, specifically, without making a performance of it, and the narrative had a new sentence in it. One he hadn't had before. I am someone who can do this, and that sentence is worth more than any lesson plan. Next is V, voice and agency. Becoming requires authorship. A student who has no genuine agency over their learning, who is always receiving, always complying, always working inside someone else's design without any ownership of the process, is not becoming. And there is a difference. Voice is not just speaking in class, it is having genuine influence over what happens in the thinking, in the direction, in the questions that get pursued. And when students are co-designers of their learning, even in just small ways, the belonging becomes theirs. Not something given, but something built. And last is E, engagement through flow. And this is where it all comes together. Flow is the state in which all of the other conditions converge into something a student can feel. Not as an abstraction, but as an experience. And when a student is in flow, genuinely absorbed, and the productive edge of their capability in a room they trust, working on something that matters, with a sense of their own agency in the process, they are not just engaged, they are becoming right there in that moment. And that is what we're designing for. Not the outcome, the experience of becoming. So Thrive is not just another engagement framework because it doesn't start from curriculum and work towards the students. It starts from the fundamental human need to be seen, heard, and recognized, and designs every condition of learning to honour that need. From babies to boardroom, the drive to belong and become is the same. Thrive is an attempt to design for it deliberately. So I want to say something that might sound like a stretch, but I want to say it because I genuinely believe it, and because I think it's important for understanding why this work matters beyond education. The need to be seen, heard, recognized, and to belong is the behavior that emerge when that need goes unmet. This is not a school problem. I've watched it in long daycare, in the baby's room, in the interactions between an eight-month-old and a carer who is too stretched to be fully present. I have watched it in a year six classrooms in low socioeconomic communities, and I've watched it in staff rooms, in leadership teams, and in parent communities. And I would argue with a fair degree of confidence that you can watch it in sales teams, in business communities, and in any human system where people need to belong in order to perform, and where the conditions for that belonging are not deliberately designed. The aggressive sales rep, the withdrawn team member, the colleague who undermines the dynamic of the group, the parent who escalates at the school gate, and the leader who controls instead of trusts. You see, I think all of them, if you look through with the right lens, are doing a version of what my student was doing in that low socioeconomic school. They are trying to become someone in a space available to them. And the space available to them is not yet designed to make that possible. Thrive begins in classrooms, but the argument it makes is about human beings, and I think that matters for how we understand what education is actually for. So let's go back to the beginning. Back to that student that I was telling you about. Look, the reason I want to come back to that student, that one that fought every morning, who found belonging in disruption because nothing else was available to him. I think about him sometimes when I'm doing this work. When I'm writing frameworks and reading philosophy and talking about dialectical processes and the conditions for genuine becoming. Because he doesn't know any of these words, he didn't need to. What he needed was room where he was safe enough to risk being wrong, where his confusion was not evidence of failure but the beginning of learning, where someone saw in the disruption, not a behavior problem to manage, but a human being trying, in the only way currently available, to become someone. I was lucky enough to be that someone for him for one term in one school, and I was lucky that it worked. But here is what I know from almost 30 years of education. That student was not unusual. He was not an extreme case. He was every student who has ever been in a room where the belonging conditions were not designed for them. Which, if we are honest, is most of them. Most classrooms are not designed for belonging. They are designed for content. And content is very important, and in no way am I saying that it isn't. But content without belonging produces exactly the behaviors we call problems. And when we respond to those behaviors without addressing the belonging conditions that produce them, well, we are treating the symptom and leaving the cause untouched. You see, Thrive is an attempt to change that. One classroom at a time, perhaps, maybe even one teacher at a time. And then that one teacher helps that one student. You see, this is going to be a slow process. Slow and possibly imperfect. Just like becoming itself. So here's the question I want to leave you with this week. Think of that one student in your class right now who is fighting you, or who has disappeared so completely you almost forgot they're there. What are they trying to tell you about the belonging conditions of your room? And what is the smallest design change that might make genuine becoming possible for them? In our last episode, we jumped the gun and we began our journey into phase two of this professional learning journey. Flow theory as a design outcome, not a personality trait. So next episode, we continue to go deeper on Chicks and Me Highly and on what the research actually says about when students enter the flow and the conditions for becoming turn into the same thing. But you know what? Until then, keep growing your flow and finding your glow. And I'd like to send out a huge shout out to Rochelle Wilson. She's been giving out some warm praise about this work that I'm doing. She's really helping my message get into areas that I didn't think it would. And you can find more about her work at Mrs. WilsonClassroom.com. Until next week, enjoy your time.