School Restart: Change on Day One

One of the statements which drives me insane is the teacher who tells me that they must, "set the strict rules from the first day, then they can ease off later." I always "suggest" that when they do that, they not only lose all the respect of their students, the literally create a room full of enemies, and if they try to "ease off" later it will go as well as... say the last days of the East German or Romanian Ceauşescu regimes.

"We cracked down, then we allowed a little more freedom"
the end of the Romanian dictatorship, 1989

If you want to begin the school year educationally, creating an ecosystem designed around student learning, you surely don't need to begin as a "tough guy," you instead have to throw out all of your "classroom management" strategies and probably almost everything else your school usually does the day kids come back from summer holidays...

Here are ten things to change at the start:

1. Do NOT welcome kids to a "new school" or a "new grade" - that's your vanity showing through, and it insists that children adapt their learning to you, instead of the educational ecosystem flexing to meet the child. Instead, welcome them to a "continuation of their learning" and of "their life." As I will say over and over here, school is about the children, it is not about the adults - it is about meeting students where they are, not creating hoops for trained monkeys to jump through.

"Step in, sit there" - Alcatraz, early 1960s

2. Do NOT assign seats, or even require sitting - imagine, you walk into a party and the first thing you hear is, "sit down over there and shut up." I, for one, am probably walking back out of the door and not coming back. If you start minute one of day one with an exercise in compliance, your school year is already "over" in many ways, and you've already lost half of your students in significant ways.

So say instead, "welcome, come on in, make yourself comfortable." If this space is to be your shared home for the next nine months, would you want to begin any other way?

3. Avoid the "ice breaker" events until you know your students well, and then they aren't needed. "Ice Breaker" games you have designed are - I'll assume unintentionally - designed to humiliate. Whatever they involve, writing, walking, running, reading, speaking may be incredibly difficult for some kids in the room, creating first day failure, first day humiliation, and, inevitably, justified anger.

Whatever age, whatever place, allow students to find their own places of comfort on day one, only then can you actually observe what the children in your room need.

4. Do NOT let your classroom be set up according to what you like - it is NOT your space, but "their's." I hear all the time from teachers, "I like this color," "I want my desk here," "I want to use this space this way," "I don't want kids writing on the floor, it's dirty," "I cannot handle too much noise," "If I don't have desks this way, I can't see." Lots and lots of "I" statements in a profession which is - quite definably - supposed to be about the children.

This moves from the (perhaps) minor, an odd love for motivational posters for example, to the ridiculous (and perhaps dangerous) - I recently saw an elementary classroom where the teacher had completely blocked the only classroom window with a "presidential-sized" desk of her own, and had filled the windowsill with her stuff so no child could possibly get to natural light. I often see middle school classrooms where teachers have covered every window, both to corridors and to the outside. I see school entryways painted in colors chosen because "the principal likes it."

It is NOT your space. It is the students' space and an essential part of education is learning to negotiate the development of shared space - especially in a society of one or two-child families, kids with their own rooms, and homes which separate instead of bringing families together.

"don't think, just repeat"
Chaplin in Modern Times

5. Stop encouraging automaticity, cultivate mindfulness instead. It is time to embrace Ellen Langer and work to replace the "robot brain" so many schools encourage with the engaged mindfulness of students consciously making decisions. "Mindfulness, [Langer] tells the medical school audience, is the process of actively noticing new things, relinquishing preconceived mindsets, and then acting on the new observations."

Langer describes what is needed everywhere in education - “the psychology of possibility,” because, “...knowing what is and what can be are not the same things,” and for students, obviously, the "can be" is all important. If it wasn't, they'd be done.

So much that we do in schools to "create habits" works toward what Langer calls "mindlessness." If a child gets off the same bus each day, walks through the same school door, down the same corridor, to the same classroom, and takes the same seat, they have begun their school day by shutting their brain down. The same is true of everything from "homework every night," to memorizing facts - is our goal really the absence of thinking?

Automaticity - mindlessness - is an industrial efficiency concept. Don't think, just repeat. Does that belong in your school?

6. Hypocrisy doesn't work - it tells children that you are a liar and a tyrant. So many children go to schools where every adult eats and drinks while using their computers, but the kids are not allowed to do the same. Many teachers have beverages while kids must wait until "snack time." Many communities tolerate behaviors in adults - and in adult leaders - which would get kids suspended or worse.

This is especially true for the young adolescents who occupy American middle schools, kids who live in the most absurd world where the only sure way they can be treated as an adult is to murder someone, but they are constantly told to "behave like an adult." Either trust kids as the humans they are, or choose to treat them like animals - but understand - they will act as you expect them to act.

7. Do NOT overdecorate with stuff you've bought - let the kids make it their own. Don't fill your classroom with purchased stuff. A great way to begin the year is to make our children into "makers." Let them paint, draw, write, build, sculpt - their passions, their lives, their dreams - and decorate right from the start with what your kids have created.

Really? Really?!

8. Human dignity matters above all - do NOT take it away. A few things must be unacceptable across your school - no one should have the right to tell someone else when they can or cannot use the toilet, no one should have the right to tell someone else when they can or cannot move to make themselves more comfortable, no one should have the right to imprison anyone in a space without something like "cause."

Now, none of this suggests that we don't learn to negotiate all of this within our own community - "how do I get up and head toward the bathroom?" "how do I move from my chair to standing in the back without bothering people?" "what are my responsibilities if I need to leave the classroom?" - but prohibitions based on whim - or some belief in "church-like" behavior - are simply not tolerable.

9. Don't tell, ask instead. I hate the notion that years in school are nothing more than preparation for some pre-cooked set of expectations for the next year. That's absurd, it tells students that their is no actual goal and that none of us understand why any kid would come to school.

Instead, we must meet students where they are. It is not the job of fifth grade teachers to prep future middle school students, it is the job of sixth grade teachers to meet their new students where they are, and then to help them move forward.

So this year, ask. Open a Google Doc and share the link. Put paper on the floor or wall. Create a TodaysMeet room, and ask your students to tell you what they did last year, and where they want to go this year.

10. Don't do what I've done here - nobody wants to look at negative lists. I recently wandered some school corridors with principals during this summer "quiet time" and in one case we tore down every "No" and behavioral "control" sign in the building, because "no" is a restriction, and a limited one at that - far better to empower possibility than to restrict the few things you can think of.

So frame things in the positive, embrace common sense, and remember, people make rules and put up signs when they have failed - when people in a community do not understand the need to do the right thing.

- Ira Socol

The First Day

I wrote this story years ago, as an undergrad in my fourth attempt at a university degree. It was even published in the university's literary magazine (which was called Amaranthus back then). I thought I'd pull it out to suggest how hard the start of school might be for some of your students.

via Churchill College, Cambridge

Au Sable Hall

Anthony is now officially panicked.  He stands rigidly, back against the wall, staring at two classroom doors across from him.  He glances at his watch, but, as is too often the case, the squiggles of numeric characters mean nothing to him.  He could be late, but he has no way of knowing.

The crucifix on the chain around his neck is jammed between his teeth, a guard, he imagines, against some kind of seizure he has never had.  Or no, perhaps what matters here is that it penetrates his lips like a mother’s nipple, warm and comforting and consoling, if he could comprehend that about his mother.

He raises the index cards in his right hand so that they fall into his field of vision.  His cue cards.  Written references to match with classroom numbers. A lesson from his special ed counselor in tenth grade.  His vision though, is no longer just reversing and scrambling images, it is becoming less precise by the second, and is no more valid than the plastic lens of a discount store brand of throw-away camera.  He should be able to match the symbols on his card to the numbers above at least one of the doors across from him or one of the doors on this floor anyway, but now, after running across the campus, after trying to find a building, after being lost in the serpentine hallways of this…  Is this even the right building?  He can not remember whether he saw or read a sign, nor whether he saw or read it correctly.  Just like he cannot make sense of any of those Arabic symbols before him that might allow him to enter his course.

Day one, he acknowledges.  Just one class been to and already behind.  Cannot read fast enough to ever catch up.  Cannot even find my way. Lost, stupid.  How did I ever graduate from high school anyway?  Go to college?  What an idiot.

Anthony sits down in the corridor.  Does not ask.  Does not cry.  Does not know how to find his way back to that other building to quit.

copyright Ira David Socol, 1998