When someone says to you ‘that person is vulnerable’ what does it make you think of?

For some people, they will think about someone who is disadvantaged in some way; either mentally or physically. For example, they may think of someone with a reduced mental capacity (unable to make decisions for themselves) and being vulnerable to harm if not looked after. Or they may think about a child being vulnerable to harm if they are not protected from risk.

For many people, vulnerability is seen as something that classifies certain groups of people as needing extra care or protection. Thus, for many people vulnerability is seen as a weakness, and it is very common for people to defend or protect themselves as much as they can from being vulnerable. In turn, people often protect themselves from being seen as vulnerable. They become guarded.

In this chapter within this course, we are going to explore vulnerability and understand its full meaning and why it is a positive feature within learning and education (not a weakness). Moreover, why you need to work with vulnerability within your students and yourself as a tutor to achieve the best results as a tutor.

Vulnerability is not a weakness, or something that needs to be protected and guarded against, it is a misused term in many ways. The now popular research from Brené Brown has shown us how vulnerability is a key aspect of connecting, problem-solving, creativity and learning.

If a student is not able to be vulnerable and to try new things when they are not sure, they are uncapable of learning to their full potential.

Moreover, if you as a tutor are not prepared to be vulnerable and open, you will never fully connect with your students, nor will you be able to learn new things, as you may need to feel like you already know everything. Vulnerability is about letting go of being the expert, being comfortable with uncertainty and being open to look at things on a deeper level.

Brené Brown defines vulnerability and how it should be understood in different ways. There is a YouTube video that captures her thinking and understanding of what it is to be vulnerable. I would suggest you watch the video now, and then come back to it at the end of this chapter.

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In a nutshell being vulnerable is a way of being that has the potential for you to get hurt or be in emotional pain. Some people will immediately ask why you would want to do that? Why would you let yourself be opened to being hurt, to feel shame, to be embarrassed or to be wounded?

According to the research of Brené Brown and other psychologists who study connection and thinking, being vulnerable is the fastest route to connection and problem solving. You cannot feel connected to others, to feel belonging and, importantly for us as tutors, problem solve and think if you are closed off to being vulnerable. Throughout this chapter, you will revisit this concept repeatedly.

To achieve a greater understanding of vulnerability and how Brené Brown was able to article this complex concept, please watch this YouTube video now.

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I advise you to watch it through the first time just by listening, then watch it again and take notes as it’s a very packed presentation.

A year later, Brené Brown made explicit connections between vulnerability and shame. To understand the concepts, we will be using for the rest of this lesson please watch this video now.

Watch Video

Asking students to learn and to be to open to learning with you in a 1:1 setting is asking them to be vulnerable

Now we have a shared view of what vulnerability is, let’s explore it in terms of students learning with you.

Are we expecting them to be vulnerable?

Is the capacity to learn with another person actually the capacity to be vulnerable?

What do you think about vulnerability, has it changed?

Brown defines five facets of vulnerability that people try to defend against or feel uncomfortable with:

• Shame,
• Scarcity,
• Fear,
• Anxiety,
• Uncertainty.

Let’s explore each one in turn and think about it in terms of tutoring.

Shame

Shame is the feeling we have when we think there is something wrong with us. Guilt is thinking you did something bad and feeling bad about that. Shame is feeling you are bad and feeling ashamed of that.

Lucy scored 10 of 80 in her maths test.

Guilt: ‘I wish I had studied harder, or that I had asked my teacher for help’

Shame: ‘I need to hide this test from people, I can’t bear to look it at it, I’m never going to be good at maths’

Feeling shame when learning in the classroom or in any learning situation is a traumatic event. Children (and adults) experience it as a trauma. Brown is the leading expert on shame research. She explains how she has over 13,000 interviews and pieces of data on shame. Importantly, 85% of those interviews describe how the interviewee had a powerful shaming experience at school which was so deeply shaming it forever changed them as a learner.

Tutors and educators have a huge power imbalance with their students. Often this power imbalance is not acknowledged by the educator and sadly, comments and judgements are cast out without understanding the impact they have on the student.

You have no guarantee of how your communication (the things you say to your student) is being received. Power can often act as a filter and change how things are heard and understood. Something simple you say to a student may cause internal upset within them if you are not mindful of your power.

Tutor says: ‘Not everyone is good at maths’

Student hears: ‘You will never be good at maths’

Children who have struggled with maths, spelling, reading and writing at school have danced with shame, and make no mistake, they are bringing that shame with them when they come to see you as their new tutor.

When you touch on the topics and academic skills that they have been shamed with, you will be touching their shame directly. If the student can be vulnerable, you will be able to help them by easing their shame and supporting them to be shame free. More will become clear as to how you help students with shame as we progress through this course. It is important to note that feelings of shame are the biggest reason why students (and tutors) can struggle to be vulnerable.

Scarcity

Scarcity concerns there not being enough to go around. This doesn’t just apply to material resources such as food, money or medicines and learning materials. Scarcity can also apply to praise, validation and importantly love.

Young children are very susceptible to thinking they are not lovable enough.  For them, scarcity mainly applies to lovability and has a surface presentation of likeability.

Young children are dependent on their parents for everything. To not be enough or feel not good enough, is to not be lovable enough. More often than not, when a child is feeling shame about not being able to spell as well as their friend can, or about not being able to do the maths problems like other people in their class can, they are full of shame and scared as they see themselves as not as loveable as their friend or others in their classroom.

The reason why younger students get so upset and overwhelmed is they view all of this ‘not being good enough’ as a threat to their survival, feeling that if they are not lovable they cannot survive because they are so dependent.

Fear

We all know what it is like to fear something. That feeling of dread, racing thoughts and sweaty palms as the feared thing gets closer. To be vulnerable is to fear and be able to stay with that fear as you move through it and out the other side.

When a student is fearing a topic (e.g. algebra or spelling) if they are able to be vulnerable, they will be able to move through that fear with you. They will initially be afraid but stay in the learning until they gain the skills and come out the other side.

You cannot move around the fear, you can only move through it. If you have empathy and connection with your student, you can support your student to not become overwhelmed so they can stay on course with you. Think back to our previous lesson on containment.

If you cannot show or apply empathy, nor can you contain, your student runs the risk of becoming overwhelmed, shamed and will back out of the task employing whatever defensive strategies that work for them.

The thing to remember about fear is that it is seen as reaction to a specific observable danger. Such as being exposed to a learning topic that will place the student in a state of uncertainty.

Anxiety

Anxiety is like fear in that it is also a response to a perceived threat or injury (being vulnerable). However, anxiety is not about one specific thing. Anxiety is unfocused, objectless and a future orientated fear. Anxiety is like a hook; the anxious person can hook their anxiety onto any issue or event in their life they feel they can use to make logical sense of their feelings.

Anxiety is the king of disguises, you think it’s about one thing, when most of the time it’s actually about a struggle to be vulnerable and opening yourself up to others.

Worries about being seen as silly, judged, being weird, not being enough and being bullied are all anxieties that are centred around being vulnerable. If your student is defending against being vulnerable, they are defending against one or more of the mentioned anxieties. It is almost impossible for students to learn when they are anxious.

Uncertainty

In order to learn we have to be open. We have to know that we don’t know and sit with uncertainty. For some learners this will be hard. Especially if ‘knowing’ is seen by them as a sign of goodness. In turn, not knowing is seen by them as a sign of weakness and of being bad, not good enough and, if learned in childhood, results in feelings of not being loveable. Learners who cannot cope with uncertainty can never allow themselves to feel vulnerable when uncertainty arises.

Tutor: ‘Let’s look at this topic in maths’

Student: Instantly feels a panic as they know they don’t know this subject well. The potential of being exposed as not knowing becomes great. This topic puts the student in touch with their vulnerability.

Student: ‘We went over that in school the other day. Can we do the geometry questions again, as I didn’t understand them?’

The student has deflected away from feeling vulnerable. They know how to do the geometry questions.

Protective defences

When we talk about protective defences, we are referring to self-protective behaviours. In the context of this chapter on vulnerability, self-protective behaviours are behaviours students employ to prevent themselves from feeling or being vulnerable.

In order to protect themselves, students need to close themselves off to feeling vulnerable. Brown refers to this as armouring up. If the capacity to being vulnerable in their learning is what keeps students open, engaged, able to think and motivated in their learning, then closing themselves off prevents the capacity to learn. Students who prefer to learn alone and try and shut the tutor out are feeling vulnerable within the tutoring relationship. Think about your students, do you have any that prefer to try out what they have learned at home, rather than do any learning exercises with you?

It’s important you realise protective defences are behaviours that are under our conscious control (we know we are doing them), and out of our conscious control (we have no awareness we are doing them).  Protective behaviours can make students disappear, become challenging, make you have feelings of irritation towards them or indifferent to helping them.

Over the past 20 years of working with tutors and hearing them talk about their students, I hear tutors say about the students they enjoy working with the most. Tutors mainly enjoy working with students that can:

• Say what help they need.
• Show a willingness to try.
• Are capable of working on problems with tutors.
• Come back to each session indicating what they have achieved and what they still need help with.
• Ask for help when they need it.

Take a look closer at the list above, what can you see? It’s the capacity to be vulnerable the tutor is warming towards.

All the other students who are more challenging are pushing the tutor away with their protective defences. Once you see these defences and employ your own curiosity about your student’s capacity to be vulnerable with you, you can use your own vulnerability to connect with those students.

We will discuss using your own vulnerability later on, but for now, let’s explore some examples of defensive behaviours and wonder how these may play out in the tutoring situation.

Brown says that defensive behaviours can be categorised into three groups.

• Moving away

In terms of education, this will be being quiet, trying to not to be seen in class. This is a lot easier to do in a classroom but more difficult to do in a tutoring session.

• Move towards

People pleasing, trying to behave in a way that the other person will see them in a good light, but not see the real them. This might be a student thanking you for helping them understand something, saying they really appreciate your help but inside not understand or be happy about what you were just tutoring. It is important to understand this praise for your tutoring is false, it is covering up the vulnerability.

• Move against

This is creating conflict to cover up the vulnerability. Easy examples are misbehaving in the classroom, being rude, not engaging, being challenging and difficult to teach. Students who move against being vulnerable are the most difficult and challenging students and may have a history of being suspended and expelled.

In my experience with working with children, young people and adults learning, there is a fourth way of defending against vulnerability and that is staying where you are and shutting down.

• Shutting down

Staying where you are and shutting down has no movement against, towards or away from the person you are with, but it’s a form of staying where you are leaving the situation. It’s that uncontained state we were discussing in our previous lesson.

Zoning out and leaving the situation. Saying ‘I don’t know’ before thinking and seeing something as too difficult to try before any attempts are made.

Let’s explore some examples and see if you can allocate the defensive strategy 1, 2 3, or 4. Also, have a think about whether the behaviour is conscious and/or has the potential to be subconscious as well. Answers will be at the end of this course.

Focusing on the highest grades already achieved or on work that’s easier

a)

David is very keen to better himself in his education, he wants higher grades and is willing to work hard. David is predicted 7  and 8 in his maths and science GCSE, but he is predicted 4 in his English. David is very engaged in telling you how he finds maths and physics easy but seems uncomfortable when you try and find what help he needs with English.

You try and do some preliminary investigations to see what English skills he has and where he needs support. However, David struggles to start any English work, he wants to tell you instead about how he did well in a previous English test a couple of years ago. Then he jumps straight to how his English teacher has been unwell for a month and he has a substitute teacher who isn’t very good and then jumps goes back to how well he is doing in his maths and physics tests.

Not doing maths questions on the whiteboard, preferring to use notepaper and do them out of sight from the tutor

b)

Sarita is coming for maths GCSE tuition. She is an online student and uses the Westcountry Whiteboard to have her lessons (a shared virtual whiteboard where both student and tutor can see each other’s markings in real time). Sarita was happy to talk to the tutor and say what she finds easy, although she was less able to say what she struggled with. However, what was pronounced was that Sarita avoided doing any maths sums on the whitebeard. She wanted to take notes and then do the sums on paper. She would then ask the tutor to do the working out and only share her answer, or she would ask the tutor to show her how to do the sums on the whiteboard.

The tutor didn’t realise what was happening and joined in with this way of working, even as the relationship developed, the tutor didn’t intervene. What the tutor didn’t realise was that Sarita was protecting her vulnerability by keeping her working and mathematical thinking a secret from her tutor. There was no joint effort on problem solving. For some tutors, you may think this is maths tuition, but it isn’t full tuition as Sarita was not able to be vulnerable and problem solve with the tutor in real time. Thus, she was unable to go further in her maths skills, she has full control of the skill level and was limiting her potential.

Talking about other things and needing the toilet before writing

c)

Kane is in year 5. He is having weekly sessions to help with his writing.  He has dyslexia and struggles to articulate his ideas through words. When he does have an idea of what to write, he then struggles with how to spell words and construct sentences.

No matter how gentle the tutor is with bringing in learning tasks, Kane wants to tell the tutor about what happens at school, what happens with his friends and what his teacher at school said that day before starting.  Once the tutor settles Kane into the task, just before he begins to write he needs the toilet and has to leave.

Screwing up work and scribbling out words when making a mistake

d)

Tina comes for help with writing and spelling. It is easy for her to start any tutoring task, but as soon as she makes a mistake, she immediately scribbles out the mistake, with harsh pen marks that create a huge dark patch on the page. If there are too many mistakes she will screw up the paper before the tutor has a chance to do anything.

Saying I don’t know before trying any maths questions

e)

Tamsyn is in year 10 and is having GCSE maths tuition, at every lesson the tutor does a quick recap of what they did the week before. Tamsyn looks at the questions and immediately says I don’t know. The tutor knows Tamsyn has dyslexia and knows she struggles to remember, but she can also see that Tamsyn is saying I don’t know with an automatic response and is not even looking at the question properly. The tutor does the best they can and goes over how to do the maths question again. Each time, Tamsyn comes alive and can do the question with the slightest prompt, confirming to the tutor that there is knowledge there.

Arguing why the maths is needed and when will I use it when any attempts of algebra are being made

f)

Justin comes in for maths tuition each week. He is in year 9 and is having support to learn algebra. However, his tutor is struggling to teach him because as soon as they start he gets angry and argumentative with the tutor about why he needs to learn algebra, when is he going to use it and states the lesson is boring. The tutor feels like she is failing to engage him and starts to dread Justin coming.

Telling the tutor, she really appreciates her help

g)

Rowan comes for maths help. She is always polite and considerate of her tutor. She thanks her all the time for her support. She constantly tells her tutor how she has made the maths easier to understand and how appreciative of it she is. Her tutor feels she is doing a good job and the tutoring is going well.

However, when Rowan is away from her tutor, she is anxious and struggling with her maths. She isn’t learning with her tutor at all as she is hiding all the things she is struggling with. She is only asking for help with things she knows she can already do. The tutor is unknowably colluding with Rowan and no learning is taking place. Rowan constantly feels overwhelmed and anxious with her learning.

Trying to get a rise out of the tutor by saying things the student doesn’t realise annoy her and then gets hurt when the tutor tells the student off

h)

Ben comes for reading support twice a week. He is constantly trying to get a rise out of his tutor. He initially treats her the same way as he would treat his sister at home, teasing and gentle insults. However, when the reading material gets harder, he increases the insults and teases the tutor about her London dialect and her pronunciation of certain words. The tutor who has modelled steadfast patience for the last 30 minutes is now struggling with feeling continually attacked. She has irritation in her voice when she reminds Ben she is there to help him with his reading and just wants to help him.

Ben instantly feels attacked and deflated; he’s upset as his tutor is annoyed with him because he cannot read very well.

Self-stigmatising

We live in world where society easily stigmatises.  Stigmatisation is where certain groups of people are categorised in a way as being worthy of disgrace or disapproval. It is a negative label. Children whose parents are in receipt of universal credits, come from single parent families or live in council accommodation are at risk of social stigmatisation and they are at risk of incorrectly being judged as being ‘less than’.

For some social circles, divorce is also a subject that can create a social stigma. Whereas for other parts of society, divorce is more commonplace and not stigmatised at all.

Mental illness often has some stigma attached to it. Whilst a lot has been done in the last decade to open up conversations about mental health and to normalise the struggles that people with mental health issues carry, there is stigmatisation in many social narratives. A good video to watch on self-stigmatisation is below. Please watch the short video now before you continue.

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The consequence of self-stigmatisation is low self-worth. When working with a student who has low self-worth, you are working with a student who has self-stigmatised themselves and feels limited by their stigma. They feel less than everyone else. For some children this can be an ingrained core belief that they are beginning to cement in their identity. The younger the child, the easier it is to help. The older the child and when into adult it can take a lot longer to support someone to let go of their self-stigmatised beliefs as it is now central to their identity.

Children with dyslexia or dyscalculia can also be at risk of stigmatisation. These learning differences are not well understood in society and the narrative often incorrectly links dyslexia with intelligence. ‘You can’t have dyslexia! You’re far too intelligent’.

I have met many parents who are reluctant to pursue any additional help in school for their child’s dyslexia and they are worried their child’s teacher will unconsciously write them off as not being able to attain. Unfortunately, in a few cases this limitation fear will be correct if the teacher has not had any additional training in dyslexia.

Self-stigmatised behaviour is when a student has become aware of the stigma that exists in society and has attached this label to themselves. They then internalise this label and create a fixed identity with it. Thus, they then have unconscious behaviours to keep this self-stigmatised label a reality. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The student then employs unconscious behaviours to defend from the anxiety about it.

Annie struggles with spelling; she is terrified of writing at school as everyone will see how stupid she is. Annie has dyslexia and she knows that people with dyslexia can’t spell and that she is abnormal. She knows she will never learn to spell and there is no hope. She is not a person who has dyslexia, her identity is enmeshed with the label, and she is dyslexia, and that’s bad. There’s nothing more to say.

Annie’s mum organises for her to see a Westcountry SEN tutor who has training in tutoring dyslexic students how to spell.  Annie doesn’t want to start tuition as there is no point, it won’t work.

When Annie comes to the first session, she is shocked that the spelling can be taught in a different way. Annie starts to see how words work as her tutor helps to break them down via meanings rather than sounds.

The next week when it’s time to come back to tutoring Annie feels very anxious and gets a headache. Annie begs her mum not to send her back again, agreeing to go to a spelling class in school where she will be with 5 other students going back to phonics.

Annie has self-stigmatised herself as being hopeless at spelling and never being literate. She is terrified of people seeing how illiterate she is and likes to disappear in classrooms at school. When she worked with the tutor, she had an experience of being able to spell and for the first time knowing she had potential. This potential scared Annie because if she wasn’t someone destined to be illiterate who was she?

Suddenly Annie was in touch with her vulnerability and of being uncertain. Annie refused to go back to tutoring to remain certain of her illiteracy and was comforted by her world being smaller.

Encourage vulnerability by modelling it

One way to encourage vulnerability is to model it. So, for that reason let’s get a firmer grip of what vulnerability isn’t, because it is easy to get it mixed up with other things.

Vulnerability isn’t telling people what you perceive to be your weakness or failures. Some people get confused about vulnerability and think that it’s about putting yourself down to be less than the other and use their perceived flaws to do this.

Vulnerability is not putting yourself down on purpose to induce a vulnerable state, instead it’s being authentic and open. Sharing your ideas, taking risks and being the whole of yourself.

If you are open and compassionate, you will be open to happiness as well as open to the potential of being hurt. Vulnerability is not about starting in a hurt or wounded place, it’s about being open to receive whatever will come, and being yourself without emotionally hiding.

The next thing to differentiate is that vulnerability is not the same as self-disclosure (talking about your own experiences). In fact, self-disclosure always runs the risk of shutting down the student you are working with as it cuts across their experience and can unintentionally become ‘all about you’. Self-disclosure isn’t always a bad thing, but it should be used with caution. It has a high potential of backfiring on you; you think it will build connection but instead you move the student away from you.

Vulnerability is not what you say, it is what you do

Can you be open with your students?

Can you work a maths problem with them and let them see you are not sure?

Can you look at problems together?

Can you apologise to them if you make a mistake?

Can you take responsibility for any errors or your own misjudgements?

Can you show them that you are human and not an expert?

Can you remain uncertain enough to learn about the student rather than have preconceived ideas about them?

Can you remain open enough to ‘see’ the student you are sat next to?

If you are vulnerable with a student then you too are open to their judgements of you and can build a very human connection with them.

Students and tutors who are able to be academically vulnerable and vulnerable enough to learn will take delight at learning new things. They will enjoy learning new ways and new ideas as ‘not knowing’ will not threaten their identity. They will not fear learning something new as they will not care about what comes after ‘what will I need to learn next’. They will relish in knowing there is a world of things they do not know and they can shape their knowledge anyway they choose.

Students and tutors who struggle to be vulnerable enough to learn will find it difficult to ask for help or seek support from someone they think may know the answer to their problems. Instead, students and tutors will hide their struggles; the student from the tutor and the tutor from the organisation they work for.

Younger children are easier to support to become academically vulnerable, even if they have had a bad experience before. The older the child, and especially into adulthood, it can be more difficult to help them. The defences against being vulnerable become harder to help the older we get, as the defences are more ingrained into their identity.

However, everyone can be helped, even in adulthood. When it comes to learning to be vulnerable, often it becomes the role of managers, employers or other authority figures to support learning vulnerability if they can.

Make no mistake, vulnerability in learning is a hard journey for many adults. When you next go to any training course or meeting, you will hear some adults be deaf to things they don’t know about and then want to tell anyone who will listen that they already knew the bits that were vaguely familiar to them. When you hear adults like that, just wonder about their ability to be vulnerable and open when learning, you will soon understand their behaviour.

Don’t rush students into vulnerability

Don’t try to reach vulnerability in the first session, defences protect core self-beliefs that are shameful, you will overwhelm the student if you strip away those defences straight away because you will expose them to their shame too soon. Play a longer game and you will support the student to have life changing relationships with learning and with the capacity to be vulnerable when learning.

It is important you understand the importance of enabling the student to feel like they have control of their learning. To do this, make sure you offer choices. Do you want to cover this topic, or this topic? Shall we recap on what we did last week for 5 minutes or 10 minutes?  Shall we do this activity, or this activity?  You are still leading the direction of the tuition, but you are doing it whilst enabling the student to have control.

Ways to support students to be vulnerable in your tutoring relationship

• Make sure the student quickly learns it’s OK to make mistakes.
• Make sure your student knows there is a difference between getting a question wrong and being wrong (e.g. the difference between making a mistake and deserving shame).
• Pick up on negative self-talk and ask the student to apologise.
• Be patient when students are telling you what they know or the areas they did well in and when they are filling the space stopping you from tutoring. When they trust you this should become less and less.
• Weave in and out of areas where the student struggles – don’t always focus on what they find difficult.
• Always end on a positive, don’t leave the lesson with the student not getting it. Never start a new topic without sufficient time for the student to master it.
• Enable students to have control and make choices.
• Always highlight the learning moment. Show the student how far they came in the session. Point out what they couldn’t do at the start and what they can now do at the end. Do this at the end of every lesson.

The two key ingredients to supporting children to feel vulnerable (and contained) is to employ your listening skills and empathy.

Shame feeds off secrecy, silence, and judgement. However, shame gets completely eroded by someone else’s empathy.

To be able to have empathy you must be able to do four things:

• Perspective taking. You must be able to really take the perspective of the student. Not assess the situation with your own perspective, or use your own perspective to try and make sense of the situation. Let go of your perspective and try to metaphorically put on the student’s glasses, what are they thinking, seeing or feeling?
• Staying free of judgement. We all judge more than we think we do. In order to have empathy you have to shut down your judgments and be fully open to what you are experiencing without filtering it. The same goes for any predictions or expectations.
• Recognise the student’s emotions for what they are. Not what you would feel, but what the student is actually feeling.
• Communicate what the student is feeling. Communicate the emotion in a containing way that enables the student to feel safe and understood.

One final note on vulnerability is that you do not need to strip students bare of all their defences and some students will not be able to be vulnerable, especially if they have suffered abuse or trauma in their past.

However, by being vulnerable and open yourself you will model a different way of learning and enable the student to cope with uncertainty and problem solve in a way they have never been able to before.