I'm a drama teacher by training and Director of Student Welfare by role. So when I first stood in front of a class to teach Human Technologies a couple of weeks ago, I'll admit there was a voice in my head asking what, exactly, I thought I was doing here. I decided to be honest with the students. I told them this was my first time teaching HT, but I also told them that our first unit, Attachment Theory, was familiar ground, as I'd studied it during my Masters. So I stood there as both a novice and, in one small corner at least, somewhat of an expert.

As it turns out, that's not a bad place to teach a subject about being human, and I think being open about both the not-knowing and the knowing helped to set the right tone from the offset: we are learning together, thoughtfully.

The HT curriculum itself is both academically rigorous and carefully prepared. However, I still found myself tweaking and adjusting, adding my pastoral and dramatic twist. In my Student Welfare role, I spend my days trying to make students feel safe, known and understood, and it seems I don't know how to switch that off at the classroom door.

Part of it was simply the room. In a drama studio, I'm used to moving through the space, letting it do some of the teaching for me. HT works differently. More often than not it asks students to look inward, to notice their own habits of body and mind and to be honest about which ones actually serve them. For a lot of young people that's unfamiliar, even uncomfortable - some may even resist it - because looking at yourself honestly is hard. This is exactly where my pastoral instincts kick in: the nudging, the gentle encouragement, the work of making students feel that HT is a safe enough place to share and explore.

HT asks a great deal of young people. It asks them to examine their relationships and the ways they connect to others, and to relate real theory back to their own lives. And no student does that truthfully unless they feel safe with the person asking. The relationship has to come first, or the content goes nowhere real.

This belief has shaped how I introduced attachment styles. Rather than asking students to talk about themselves, I gave them a role to hide behind. In pairs, they wrote a short text exchange demonstrating a style: secure, anxious, avoidant or inconsistent, without naming it. Then they asked me to read their exchanges aloud, for a bit of dramatic flair, which is how I found myself performing the word "bruh," something I had promised myself, as an adult and a teacher, I would never say! Afterwards, we guessed the styles together. Students don't hand their work over like that unless they feel comfortable in the room, and in that small request, my two worlds folded into one. That playfulness, the performance, the shared laugh, was exactly what made the room safe enough for honest work.

It's only been a couple of weeks, but that voice asking what I thought I was doing here has gone quieter. HT asks young people to be honest about themselves, and whether I'm teaching it, asking a student to take a risk in front of their peers, or sitting with one through a hard week- the job is the same: making them feel safe enough to be honest in the first place.