I once helped a friend’s company in conducting a series of innovation and enterprise training for a class of secondary school students.

During the first session, most of the students were well behaved and participated actively.
However, there were a few students arrived late and were not in the mood of this extra lessons.
During the 2 hours session, they were restless, they tried distracting other students by talking loudly, hopping from one group of students to another. They were the non-conformist.

Naturally, the first thought that came into my mind was “Oh, there are three potential trouble makers?”
I am not their form teacher, I have no authority to ‘discipline’ them

However, through my many years experience of coaching people and interacting with young adults, I know that everybody deserves a chance to be understood, especially the teenagers.
In their growing up years, from a child to an adult, they probably need time and encouragement to shape their identity. They probably need the recognition for their unique talent too.

Instead of just controlling them by showing authority or disciplinary action, I played along with their joke of “foreign talent” (one of the hot topics in Singapore) and also divert their attention into getting the right talent for their team, similar to soccer team like EPL.

Instead of sticking to strict rule of having a team of fiver students, I allowed a team to recruit the ‘noisy’ student as their sixth member aka foreign talent. At the same time, I get this foreign talent to agree to contribute. Soon, the students were playing along with that idea. The foreign talent also get acceptance and wanting to contribute in the team.

Similarly, for another student who seemed to be quite aloof, instead of labeling him as ‘slow’ or ‘not interested’, I started to reach out by remember his name, recognized his idea, getting the whole class to listen to him, helped him to make his idea better and let him has the credit. Soon, he started to realized he can contribute and wanting to do more.

The subsequent session, the whole class performed better, especially the group with ‘foreign talent’. They were the group scoring the highest point during that session.

Had I decided to label them ‘the bad students’, I would have missed out the opportunity in uncovering the talent of these two special students. They could be the non-conformist but allowing them space to express their identity and appreciate their unique way of contribution at times could provide good stimulus to a group with a spark of new idea.

So, there is no bad student…

It started with a belief that every individual is good and awaiting us to uncover the GEM within them.