Aoife fidgets in her seat. She is trying to focus on reading the text along with the rest of the class, but finds herself keeping her teacher in her peripheral vision, tracking her as she moves around the classroom; she hasn’t quite learned to trust her yet.

The text is one that Aoife has read before. It was in her mock exam last year - the mock that eventually led to her centre-assessed grade being moved down from a 4 to a 3. That grade is the reason why she is sitting here, now, in a resit class.

Her new teacher has said she thinks Aoife will get a 4. But so did her old one. And now Aoife is “resitting” an exam that she never even sat in the first place.

Given all of that, it isn’t really surprising that she has her guard up.

Building relationships of trust is important in any classroom. But with a GCSE resit class, this process can be more complicated than it would be with students studying a course for the first time.

For starters, older learners have more developed powers of epistemic vigilance - the inbuilt set of cognitive mechanisms that we all use to protect ourselves from being misled. Add to this the fact that many students, like Aoife, arrive in college having already had a negative experience of education and you have a real challenge on your hands to break down walls and get students to trust you.

So what do FE teachers need to know about epistemic vigilance and the barriers it creates in the classroom? And how can they use that knowledge to get resit learners to trust them ahead of their exams next month?

Epistemic vigilance is a process by which all of us put up “walls” between ourselves and others. It is a method of self-preservation, and is completely natural, explains Peter Fonagy of the Anna Freud Centre.

“When you first meet a person, you don’t know if what that person tells you is going to be untrue or unreliable or motivated by malevolence,” Fonagy explains. “So we are programmed to start off as reasonably vigilant, and the basic start for most of us is mild scepticism. And then people build up trust.”

Mistrust issues

This is a useful process, and one that teachers would actually want to encourage in FE learners - we want young people to be discerning consumers of information, and to recognise what is a trustworthy source and what isn’t. The problems come when that scepticism is misplaced and students have learned to distrust their teachers. And in resit classes, as explained above, these issues can be worse than for other age groups, in a context where time to gain the trust of students before they sit exams is minimal.

“Failure will make students feel shame, which is incompatible with trust,” explains Fonagy. “Shame makes you withdraw and you pull back, and this makes it difficult for the teacher to see the point of view of the student. The student is not engaging as much, and the potential for developing trust is not there. Shame builds a wall of vigilance.”

So what can be done to break down that wall? The process isn’t simple, says Fonagy, but there are some things that teachers can try to encourage students to let their guard down. For instance, he says, one method that humans use to decide if a person is trustworthy is “to see if that person shows an interest in us as a person”.

This is an approach that has worked well for Hollie Callaghan, a sixth-form teacher at Flixton Girls School in Urmston, Greater Manchester. “I don’t think that there is any amazingly creative way to build relationships,” she says. “Ultimately, I try to get to know my students as best as I can. That simply means taking an interest in their interests and asking them about themselves.”

It’s important to demonstrate that your interest is genuine, she adds, as students will be able to spot if you’re faking it. “Pupils can tell if you are simply asking these questions in a forced way or if you genuinely care about them,” explains Callaghan.

Relationship building

Janet Gater, assistant principal and teaching and learning lead at Carmel College in St Helens, Merseyside, agrees that authenticity is important here. She encourages her staff to treat students as individuals and to focus on developing genuine relationships with them.

“As a college, we aim for our students to feel as if there is no barrier between teacher and student. And we do that by building authentic human relationships with them,” she says. “We make sure they know we really like them and we support them.”

This has to be more than just a chat at the end of a lesson - it needs to be sustained and never an afterthought.

The method that Callaghan uses is building students’ interests directly into her subject teaching. “It’s important to have the ability to talk around your subject and link it to current issues in order to make the subject real to your students,” she says. “Issues that are important to your students are happening in society and relate to their lives.

“[For example] as a PE teacher I will discuss discrimination regarding how female sporting professionals are paid and their representation in the media. These issues are important to our students; you don’t need them to be a topic on an exam paper to bring them to light.”

Once you have tapped into students’ interests, the next step is to position yourself as someone who is similar to them, suggests Gater. This means demonstrating that you make mistakes, too. She encourages her staff to explicitly acknowledge their own fallibility, which she thinks is an important step in gaining students’ trust.

“Self-deprecating humour is used a lot in the classroom,” she says. “It isn’t ever about ‘look at how great we are’. Teachers make mistakes, and they make sure students know that this is normal and this is OK.”

At the same time, staff should help their students not to dwell on issues in their past at school, Gater says. This will allow them to move forward in time for their resits, and is all part of getting rid of those feelings of shame that Fonagy cites.

“The college still recognises that these students have a lot to offer,” Gater explains. “You’re more than just your GCSE score. That’s central to the mission of the college. If they got these grades because they messed about, we tell them that we all make mistakes, and we can forgive them for that.”

Being explicit and honest about this is important, she adds. Students need to know what they have done wrong in the past, but also that mistakes do not define them. That may be particularly important this year, as learners are likely to feel even less ownership of their existing grades than usual.

All in this together

Acknowledging that the process was flawed last year - and being empathetic about that - is key, says Fonagy.

“The student needs to feel that they and the teacher have a shared mindset - you are in the ‘we mode’,” he says. “The teacher has stepped into the mental space of the student, and you can jointly work together.”

This also matters when talking about the resit process. Positive messages are all very well, but it should be understood that there really are barriers to learning and that overcoming those barriers can be tough.

“Teachers who recognise the learning problem from the point of view of the student are good teachers,” Fonagy explains. “That is the way teachers overcome epistemic vigilance. They are able to put their mind into the shape of their student’s mind. [But] even if we understand the world from their perspective, sometimes we don’t let the students know it. So you need to address this in your behaviour.”

Ultimately, it comes down to showing students that the way they see themselves matches up with how you see them, says Fonagy. For trust to exist, teachers have to be tuned in to who their students believe they are. By demonstrating that you are willing to look beyond the grades, you ensure that those learners feel “seen”. And that is the real key to dismantling each brick in the wall of epistemic vigilance so that learning can get through.

Is this all a huge ask in the short window before resits? Yes. Is managing this with every student impossible in the short timeframe? Undoubtedly. But will FE teachers strive to take these lessons and apply them with the optimistic aim of reaching every single young adult? Of course - while there may be trust issues from a student towards a teacher, an FE teacher will always have trust in their ability to help every student succeed.

Grainne Hallahan is Tes recruitment editor and senior content writer

This article originally appeared in the 16 October 2020 issue under the headline “Breaking down barriers with resit students”