Hold the seat and teach the balance
Hold the seat and teach the balance
"When I feel my tummy go funny, I do my breaths and it gets small again."
A Year 2 student at St Joseph's Catholic School in Paeroa said that. This was a child who had found transitions hard and often withdrew, or had big outbursts, during group activities. Nobody managed them into calm. Their teachers named emotions out loud, kept routines predictable, used visual supports and practised short co-regulation strategies every day, until the child could spot the signals in their own body and ask for help.
That's the whole idea in one small moment, and it's what Cognitive-Affective Learning (CAL) is built on.
A student can be well managed and still not be able to manage themselves.
The bike
Most of us have taught a child to ride a bike. A hand on the seat keeps them upright, but it's only when we teach them to feel their own balance, and then let go, that they can ride alone.
When the classroom gets hard, most of us reach for the hand on the seat. We want calm rooms, safe playgrounds and teachers who aren't running on empty. Cognitive-Affective Learning is after the same calm, and it goes further, because it teaches the balance too. That's why I think it's the better answer to challenging behaviour.
Three reasons
It works on the cause. Ross Greene's line says it best: Kids do well if they can. When they aren't, a skill is missing or a problem is unsolved, and skills can be taught. Compliance can be managed from the outside, but self-belief has to be grown from within. The routines, visual supports and co-regulation in that Year 2 story also line up with what trauma-informed practice calls for, so this way of working is kind to the learners who find school hardest.
It's done with, not to. Managing behaviour leaves students and whānau in the audience. Cognitive-Affective Learning makes them partners. Russell Bishop and his colleagues found that dialogue-rich teaching was only observed in lessons where whanaungatanga was strong, and that's the thinking we build on.
It sits within how you already teach. Cognitive-Affective Learning isn't an extra to squeeze into a full timetable, and it isn't a separate lesson or a programme on the side. It sits within current teaching approaches and gives them a relational foundation to work from. At St Joseph's, teachers wove emotional and relational learning into literacy and maths, with character emotions in shared reading and perspective-taking in comprehension, and it dovetailed with the school's structured literacy professional learning. The refreshed New Zealand Curriculum (Te Mātaiaho, September 2026) points the same way. It names self-management and self-regulation as capabilities developed through everyday learning, not taught separately.
And we can show it
Here's our point of difference. Cognitive-Affective Learning lets us assess growth in the "soft skills", so it can be seen as well as felt, and whānau are part of how we do it. A triangulated approach brings together a standardised assessment for students from senior primary up, teacher observation and whānau voice, with alternative means for junior and middle primary that also draw on whānau voice. When the strands tell the same story, we can see a student's growth, and whānau help tell that story.
The research points the same way. Durlak and colleagues found an 11 percentile-point gain in achievement across 213 school-based programmes, and follow-up work found benefits still visible up to 18 years later. At St Joseph's Catholic School in Paeroa, Reading at or above expected went from 65% in 2021 to 94% in 2025, with Writing and Maths rising too, and the students' own words tell the same story.
Let's have a chat
I've pulled the thinking, the curriculum links and six questions to test any PLD into a white paper, Social-emotional PLD is the better answer to challenging behaviour. Sign up for the free St Joseph's case study on our Cognitive-Affective Learning page and you'll get the white paper as an extra.
If your school or cluster is weighing up PLD for behaviour, I'd love to talk about what Cognitive-Affective Learning could do for your students, teachers and whānau. Bring the classroom scenario your current approach doesn't touch, and we'll work out how to do it with the people at the centre.
Email me at mam@momentumlearning.ac.nz.
Ngā mihi,
Mary-Anne
Are We Growing People, or Just Growing Their Need for Us?
Are We Growing People, or Just Growing Their Need for Us?
Same team, same fortnight, two leaders doing what felt like the same thing: giving feedback.
One of the leaders on that team has a habit of just telling her people what she thinks of their practice: quicker, cleaner, and nobody ever seemed to mind. Not long ago, one of her staff messaged her about something completely within their own judgement, and asked what she'd do. Not because they couldn't see it. Because some part of the pattern between them had quietly taught that staff member to check first.
Another leader on the same team holds more silences than most people find comfortable; some long enough to feel a bit awkward for everyone in the room. Not long ago, I observed one of their team handle something genuinely hard, well, with nobody in the room to check with. They didn't need him. That was the whole point, and I noticed it happening side by side, in the same team, within the same fortnight.
Neither of their teams turned out that way because of one decision either leader made in the moment. They turned out that way because of a pattern nobody was watching closely enough.
That's the bit that sat with me. Every time a leader chooses telling or coaching, they're not just responding to what's in front of them; they're quietly building a habit in the person across the table, one conversation at a time, whether they mean to or not. And the habit being built isn't always the one they think they're building.
It's worth naming, too, that the pull toward the first leader's habit is a genuine trend at the moment, not a personal quirk. Most of us have sat through years of feedback so softened it barely landed, and the correction (direct, explicit feedback, say the actual thing) is understandable. But a correction can overshoot. Somewhere between "stop hedging" and "make direct, explicit feedback the whole toolkit," we can end up building the very dependency we were trying to fix: clearer conversations, but fewer people who can think without us in the room.
Telling, done often enough, unintentionally creates dependency, and sets you up as the expert, the one who knows. Even when each individual answer was right, even when it was genuinely the kind thing to do in the moment (Brené Brown's clear is kind, unclear is unkind holds up conversation by conversation), the pattern across dozens of conversations can quietly teach someone that the knowing lives with me, not with them. Not because I set out to be the expert. Because every time I answered instead of asking, I cast myself in that role again, a little more permanently each time. That's not a failure of any single moment of telling. It's what telling becomes, unwatched, over time.
But telling also creates something worth keeping: trust that I'll actually say the thing. Nobody grows from a coach who's gone so precious about never telling that they've become impossible to get a straight answer out of. That's its own kind of unintended creation: confusion wearing curiosity's clothes.
Coaching, done well and often enough, unintentionally creates exactly what I saw this week: someone who doesn't need me in the room. Marcel Proust had the line for it: We don't receive wisdom, we have to discover it for ourselves, and nobody can take that journey for us. Every question I hold instead of answering is a small deposit into someone else's capability, and John Whitmore was right that the whole point of coaching is unlocking a person's potential to maximise their own performance, but you don't see the return on that deposit in the room. You see it weeks or months later, somewhere you're not. Asking, done properly, creates agency. Not because a question was asked, but because the person on the other end of it was genuinely free to land somewhere I hadn't already decided on.
And that's the catch: it only works if the coaching is real. A question with my answer hiding inside it isn't coaching. It's a guessing game with better manners, and most people can feel the difference within a sentence or two: the slight narrowing, the sense that there's a "right" response I'm fishing for. That version doesn't create agency at all. It creates something worse than dependency: someone quietly trying to work out what's in my head instead of what's actually true for them. Genuine coaching has to be willing to be surprised by the answer. If I already know where I want the question to land, I'm not coaching; I'm just telling, slowly, and making them do the work of finding my answer for me.
Its unintended cost, done badly, is real too: held without care, coaching creates exhaustion instead of capability. Too many questions, too much silence, not enough of the plain, clear thing they actually needed, and what you've built isn't independence. It's someone who's learned that asking me for help doesn't get them anywhere, so they've quietly stopped asking.
Underneath both of those failure modes sits the same missing thing: knowing what great actually looks like, and that can't just live in my head. A telling answer is only worth giving if I've genuinely got a clear, well-formed picture of what good looks like here; otherwise I'm not being direct, I'm just being confident. And a coaching question is only genuine if I'm holding that same picture lightly enough to let someone else's version of great turn out different from mine, without me quietly steering them back toward my answer. But it can't stop with me holding the standard privately either. If the coachee doesn't have their own clear sense of what effective practice looks like, every question I ask lands as a guessing game from their side too; they're not searching for their own answer, they're searching for mine. Both of us need to be looking at the same picture of great before a question can do honest work. Without that shared reference point, telling becomes guessing dressed up as expertise, and coaching becomes guessing dressed up as curiosity, on both sides of the table at once.
So the two things I'm actually trying to build, on purpose, are narrower than "always tell" or "always coach": clarity, freely given, on what's actually true, and space, genuinely held, for someone to decide what it means. The observation gets handed over. The verdict gets left for them to reach. Do that consistently enough, and what you're unintentionally creating starts to look a lot more like what you meant to create in the first place.
Check out my High Impact Coaching programme here.
Go with wisdom this week
Mary-Anne 😊
Feels or Facts?
Feels or Facts?
I get it. You're in the thick of it, something feels off, and you want to name it before it grows. That instinct isn't wrong.
It's easy to reach for something like "the team's really struggling right now" when that's the sense you've got. A feeling. A comment overheard once. One rough week, quietly generalised.
"Is this feels or facts?" is something I ask the leaders I work with a lot. Not because feelings don't matter, they're usually the first sign something's worth looking at properly. But a feeling is where a conversation starts, not where it should end. By the time you raise it with someone else, it needs to have turned into something sturdier than "I've got a sense."
A strong opinion said with confidence can travel just as far as a fact. The evidence is what tells you which one you're holding.
This isn't about being clinical, and it's not about needing a spreadsheet before you're allowed to have a conversation. It's about knowing the difference between "I've observed this directly, three times, in this specific way" and "I have a feeling about this." Those are two different conversations. The person on the other end can usually tell which one they're getting.
A few questions worth asking before the conversation, not during it:
Is this feels, or facts? The honest answer tells you whether you're ready to raise it yet.
If I had to show someone the evidence, what would I actually show them? If the answer is "not much yet," that's worth knowing early.
What would change my mind here, and have I actually looked for it? Genuine willingness to be wrong is often what makes people trust what you're bringing to them.
Next time you're about to raise something with someone, is it feels, or facts?
