If there is one thing that you learn when you are surrounded by freezing fog, standing on top of a remote hill, 30 miles into a 50-mile ultramarathon, it is that the mind can be a truly powerful thing.

Despite the months of training and careful preparation, it doesn’t take much to derail your thinking from “I’m the Mo Farah of the mountains” to “nobody would care if I just went home”.

The experience got me thinking about the narratives we tell ourselves and the immense power we have to change and control them. Yes, I felt tired, but could I go on? Of course! Was I sore? Not really, but the mind plays games and the mind is strong.

I ended up taking this back into the classroom. By the time students reach me at the age of 11, many have developed a clear narrative about their relationship with school, my subject and their supposed abilities. You see the students who have been repeatedly told that English just isn’t “their thing”. Often, it wasn’t their parents’ “thing” either and that narrative has become ingrained over generations. This kind of thinking is powerful; just as with me, stuck at a crossroads halfway through a race, the narrative can make all the difference to the outcome. So, what did I do?

1. Growth mindset

One of my first encounters with changing how students think about themselves came via Carol Dweck’s work on growth mindset.

I made very simple changes at first, focusing my praise on hard work as opposed to levels of achievement, as Dweck and her colleagues recommend, followed by changes in the focus of conversation when addressing the class as a whole.

I started to focus on the positives, praising the whole group for the work they had done, and assuming that all were putting in the effort required, even if some of them were shuffling around in a sheepish manner and avoiding eye contact.

There is something incredibly powerful about the group dynamic, or pack mentality, whichever term you prefer, in secondary schools, and constantly telling students that the majority of them are falling short of your expectations just normalises this behaviour; they are part of a group and if this is what the majority are doing, then they had better damn well do the same if they want to fit in.

This is something that Matt Pinkett and Mark Roberts argue is especially true for boys in their book Boys Don’t Try?, with the narrative of anti-education being especially powerful for this group.

2. Challenge myths

A Year 11 student recently told me, with enthusiasm, that absolutely all of his friends did no revision. Immediately, it took me back to my running experiences and reminded me of some of the runners I had encountered over the years. At the starting line, there is always a group (and sorry to stereotype, but they are often male) who tell everyone within earshot how they haven’t trained, have drunk something in the region of 10 pints the night before and haven’t slept a wink. The reality of it, though, is that they have been running for five years, have been closely monitoring their fuel intake over a number of months, and may or may not have slept due to race nerves.

What they are doing, when they loudly proclaim all of this, is building a specific narrative, a narrative that they can use to explain away any poor performance. They can tell this to those around them and they can tell it to themselves. All those peers telling my Year 11 student that they haven’t “trained” are doing exactly the same.

I try to counter this anti-revision narrative by showing students some statistics: Mr Bruff, of YouTube fame, often publishes how many have viewed his different revision videos; Seneca, an online revision tool, clearly shows data on how much time a class, a year group or even a school have spent on revising.

These give a very different narrative and one that, if they are going to be competing in the new GCSE grading systems, they need to get on board with. That has been a powerful message for some of my less motivated students.

3. Metacognition

There are also some significant links between these internal narratives and the ideas around metacognition and self-regulation. The Education Endowment Foundation’s metacognition toolkit has been a valuable resource and I often use the strategies it details; for example, encouraging students to reflect on the tools they have available to problem solve based on their prior learning experiences and setting their own personal targets for improvement. Reminding students of how they have approached difficulties in the past and drawing on this knowledge when encountering something new often proves to be extremely powerful and enables students to take greater ownership of their own learning. They know they can do it.

I examine the choices I need to make when tackling a task and articulate the ways I can evaluate my own progress, modelling to students how they can do the same.

When an unhelpful narrative of “I can’t do this” or “this is hard” pops into their head, we have processes to use to shift away from that type of thinking. They can look back to occasions where they have been successful and review the steps they took then. They can break tasks into smaller, more manageable pieces, again enabling them to hear a narrative which can become a reality.

4. A nudge in the right direction

Nudge theory, which has been used in business for a while, also uses language to shift the narrative, some of which has been shown to be effective when addressing issues with attendance in school.

In one study in Philadelphia in 2017, a single postcard sent to carers, comparing their child’s attendance with their peers’, as opposed to giving carers numerical data such as a percentages, resulted in a 2.4 per cent increase in school attendance. Of course, 2.4 per cent may not seem earth shattering, but for a student struggling to attend for even 90 per cent of the time, that increase will make a huge difference to their potential outcomes. Short, positive messages focusing on small changes in behaviours could have more potential for us than we are even yet to realise.

Obviously this, as always, is no magic wand and doesn’t solve everything. If you have spent the best part of 10 years, as is the case with some Year 11 students, believing that you can’t achieve, then someone simply telling you that you can isn’t suddenly going to override the dominant story in your head. There are some students who have had it reinforced so many times that any shifts may be negligible.

However, I have seen shifts happen that have significantly changed a student’s outcomes. I have seen students who felt unable to step into a class as they believed they had failed before they had even tried successfully complete GCSE courses. I have seen students who believed that they would never be able to write more than a few sentences write essays and descriptions that made them truly proud and which they took home to share with their families.

So that’s why I continue to nudge, praise and shift my language to try to refocus minds whenever I get the chance. Like my staring into the blistering cold 20 miles ahead, seeing other runners wrapped in space blankets and sipping hot chocolate, my students’ desire to give in to the narrative of defeat is strong. They are facing yet another hill.

However, just as I somehow finished that race, they can get to the finish line, too. They just need the right story to get them there.

Zoe Enser is director of learning at Seahaven Academy in East Sussex

This article originally appeared in the 20 SEPTEMBER 2019 issue under the headline “How I kept my students running up that hill”