We have all read about how social media, and related screen time, impact on the sleep patterns of children, how it may result in greater occurrences of mental health issues, that it reduces students ability to concentrate and that it may reduce achievement levels but what about the other side of things.

We live in a more stressful world than ever before.   When I did my standard grades and the odd O-level I wanted to achieve the best results possible but looking back I don’t feel there was any significant pressure.   I don’t remember discussions of leagues tables or comparisons of countries against other countries or even wide scale coverage of the headline results or subject by subject analysis.    These are all common theses days.   Our children are constantly having the narrative reinforced, that exams will shape their future and that they are therefore of massive importance.   This adds stress but where can students go to share their feelings of stress, to vent, to express and to get support and advice?    They could go to their parents, teachers or other adults but our children often find this difficult due to concerns about being judged or about the resulting impact of sharing.  Sharing with a teacher may result in being “put” in extra lessons or being seen to be “less able” whereas sharing with parents may result in having some of their liberties taken away in order to help them “focus” or “put in more effort”.     They must also consider that adults views on things will be based on their experiences which happened some years in the past and therefore do not fully have a bearing on the current world context and on the environment that the students find themselves in.   Social media provides a better option as students can share with their peers and get advice and support from people going through the same situation, in the same, current, context.   A quick look at social media heading up to A-Level and GCSE results day showed plenty of examples of students expressing their stress and worry over the impending results envelope, and/or text message.    This shows a concerning trend but may also have positive implications in that the students can use social media to vent their concerns and frustrations.   Social media also has plenty examples of students sharing words of support, comfort and advice with one another.

We now live in a world where students movements are more closely controlled and monitored.   Gone are the days of the lone instruction being to be “back before the street lights come on”.   Now parents seek to know where children are.    Parents may also ban students from some locales on the basis of perceived risk.  You also have shops banning groups of youths loitering and in some cases even installing devices to make such loitering painful.     There are less opportunities for our children to be social with each other.   Once again social media steps in.    Social media spans the gap allowing children to be social, to discuss and share their thoughts and feelings, even when the adults in their life and society in general is continuing to further curtail the opportunities they have for being social, for fulfilling a basic human instinct which I suspect is all the stronger in a youths teenage years.

I am not saying social media is all good nor am I willing to accept it is all bad.    In the world we now live in it simply “IS”.   What we therefore have to be mindful of is considering the positives and negatives and doing our best to maximise the positive opportunities while reducing as much as is reasonably possible the negatives.

But in order to encourage students to become such champions we must embrace them as individuals and seek to understand and encourage such individuality.

Another posting talked about how education was being reduced from an art to a science through increasing focus on achievement data and standardised testing.    (Apologies for not including the link/reference however I appear to have misplaced it for now: Will hope to resolve and include the reference asap).   This posting suggested to me a move towards processes and systems at the expensive of relationships and away from the fuzzy arts of emotional intelligence and interpersonal skills.

Day in day out we walk into classes to work with our students, to learn with our students and importantly to interact with our students.    I remember back to some female staff who worked with me who had particularly good results in terms of student achievement.   When asked how they achieved this they explained that they “mothered” the students.    Now what they meant by this as far as I was concerned is that they spent a significant amount of time focused on relationships; on understanding their students and allowing their students to understand them.

So when we look at improving outcomes we look at more differentiation, assessment for learning, target setting with D grade students and the like.   We focus on processes.  Maybe we should first examine the relationships as without proper relationships any process we implement are likely to fail.

@mrbadura summed it up perfectly on twitter as below:

And just as an additional thought the relationships don’t stop with the teacher and student.   What are the relationships like between staff or between teacher and school leaders?    What is the organisational climate of the school like?   Also, what about the relationships between the staff and parents or other stakeholders?