5.2. The role of educators in the S.C.R.E.A.M! methodology

To reach their maximum potential, students need to learn how to face their challenges and express them. The challenges can be looked at as individual projects and challenges that students work on. Every time they solve one of these challenges, they become better equipped to adapt to various learning environments and life in general. But they can’t do this alone. They need support from educators. This is why one of SCREAM’s purposes is to make educators aware of the most common challenges (or baggage) students carry with them when they enter VET. Making them aware of these existing challenges, will help them support students verbalize their challenges to themselves and others. Implementing the lessons learnt in the S.C.R.E.A.M! manual the educators will also be able to encourage students to look at the challenges as opportunities to grow and show them ways to overcome them individually or through collaboration and peer support systems. The main aim with S.C.R.E.A.M! is to make students aware that they are the ones carrying the negative baggage and that they must take ownership of this baggage if they want to make the negative baggage into something positive.

S.C.R.E.A.M! is a new way to look at the (negative) baggage that educators and students carry with them to the college and to the classroom and in worst case scenario to the work placements and further through life. Existing negative baggage can be strengthened by their mis-adaptation and frustrations with the reality they face, their preconceived expectations of their own or other’s skills, existing challenges as well as past failures. The S.C.R.E.A.M! methodology supports educators and students focus on self-analysis, active listening and identifying existing baggage that might affect emotions and learning in a negative way.

The S.C.R.E.A.M! methodology will help educators to establish trusting and empowering connections with students and help them recognize why they sometimes choose failure instead of making a serious attempt to succeed. But to be able to do this, educators need to become more sensitive to the way students think and what their past references and experiences are. Active listening is, once again, the key to this. Don’t think you know the past of the student or the life the student is living. You don’t! You only know what the student chooses to show you at a specific moment. Make students verbalize their hopes and fears. Don’t come with your solutions. Instead support and motivate students to verbalize their own solutions. Give students the time they need! It takes time to put words to things you are not used or that you don’t feel comfortable talking about.

Try and get to the root of students’ frustrations. What is truly behind the student’s frustration? Ask them if there is something that they can do to overcome the frustration and ask what support they think you can give them. Once again, don’t force the responses, give students time. They might not say anything at first but once you prove your trustworthiness, they will learn to trust you and they will slowly start to open up. Never judge a student for their feelings or try to show to them that what they are feeling is wrong. Their feelings are their feelings, and there is something that makes them feel the way they do. Accepting their reality/feelings is one way of showing them that you believe in them and that you will support them in the growth progress.

Remember that the students are in the center of everything and that all students want to succeed in life. But how can you make students with low self-esteem or who have built themselves a strong defense wall or are acting out in negative ways succeed and see their self-worth? As said above you must become active, non-judgmental listeners who know how to encourage students to open their world to us. You need to understand their realities and fears and help them come to terms with their past while building up a more positive and encouraging future. You need to help them make short term as well as long term plans by setting up realistic and reachable goals. You need to become a facilitator of learning and empower change. You need to accept that not everybody wants to open up when asked to do so. This mustn’t discourage you! Instead, stay patient and accept that miracles don’t happen at once.