Communicate with Teenagers

Some conversations with teenagers go nowhere. You need to raise their drinking, a worrying new friendship or the wrong shoes, and within a minute they've shut down or walked off.

Often the problem isn't what you said but when and where you said it, and whether you were the right person to say it at all. Plan the conversation before you start it. Would a tutor, mentor or another adult be better placed? Is the kitchen better than their bedroom, or after the lesson better than at the door? You'll get short scripts to adapt for opening a difficult topic, and a way to end one that leaves the door open ("I'm glad we've started this, let's pick it up in form time tomorrow").

And when a pupil ignores an instruction, you'll think to check for an unidentified speech and language difficulty before treating it as defiance.