Four Things Teachers Shouldn't Be asking Their Students to Do

This week’s article summary is 4 Things Teachers Shouldn't Be Asking Their Students to Do.

I found this an apt article as we begin the second half of the year and re-set school and classroom norms after a lengthy hiatus.

Way back at our all-school opening meeting, I spoke about how we develop character in our students within a culture of responsibility and respect.

I like pairing responsibility and respect because they ask all members of a community to look both inward and outward--to be cognizant of how their behaviors and actions reflect on how others view them and how they impact others.

Character development (defining one’s sense of self and embracing the responsibility of caring for others) takes time, vigilance, role modeling, constant reminders, and nuance/flexibility.

What I especially like about the article is it reminds us that our students aren’t mini-adults and their needs are different from us: learning for them is much more physical and multi-sensory than for adults.

One of our Program Pillars is empowering students as learners. This extends to their behavior, decision-making, and interactions with others, and it extends to us understanding what norms/expectations are appropriate and realistic for kids and to help guide and redirect them when they inevitably misstep.

Joe

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As teachers, we can make kids do almost anything we want. We have all kinds of power over them, from getting them in trouble at home to taking away the things that make school tolerable, like going outside for recess or sitting with their friends in class. But just because we can make our students do what we want doesn’t mean we should.

Children aren’t just smaller versions of adults. They are their own kind of being. They need to move, talk, question, and explore more than we do, because they’re in the midst of that mind-boggling explosion of cognitive, physical, and social-emotional growth that marks childhood in our species.

When it comes to behaviors like staying quiet or sitting still, it doesn’t make sense to hold young children to norms better suited to adults, because the way they experience the world is fundamentally different from the way grownups do.

In school, we often ask children to do things that are unreasonable given their developmental level. Worse still, we sometimes ask them to do things we would never expect of adults.

Take these four examples.

 

Silence: Many schools expect a monastic code of silence while students are traveling the halls. The rationale makes sense at first glance, and it’s one I’ve explained to my class many times: "Other students are working right now, and we don’t want to disturb them." Still, if I were a kid, I’d wonder: "If that’s true, why aren’t teachers silent in the hall?"

Chatter in the hallways, or even the squeaking of wet shoes on the floor as a class returns from recess or P.E., doesn’t seem to bother most students. In fact, the only occasions when I’ve seen kids completely distracted by what’s happening out in the hall are those times when a teacher is reprimanding his or her class. We should take a close look at the times we expect kids to be silent in school. We need to distinguish between those times it’s truly for the good of the students, and when it has more to do with the appetite for control so deeply inculcated in adults placed in charge of children.

Sitting Still for Too Time:  For kids sitting still is hard. There’s a lot we can do to make it easier on them.

• Take brain breaks—including dance parties. There are plenty of great videos on websites like GoNoodle
• Let students get up—without raising their hand for permission—whenever they need to get a book from the class library, grab a pencil, or just stretch their legs for a minute.
• Above all, keep the teacher talk time to a minimum. A useful guideline is that students should be able to listen attentively for their age in minutes—five minutes for a kindergartner, 15 for a sophomore in high school. Save most of your words for conversations with students one-on-one or in a small group. Children, like adults, learn the most when they’re engaged in meaningful work—not sitting and listening while the teacher does all the talking and thinking.

 

Forced Apologies: I have definitely been guilty of this one. I’ll break up a heated argument, then immediately demand that one or both kids apologize to one another, while their faces are still flushed with emotion from their recent conflict. The early-childhood program my daughter attended never made the children tell each other, "I’m sorry," because an apology extracted by an authority figure isn’t a true expression of remorse. Forced apologies don’t seem to offer much satisfaction to the child who receives them, either—seeing the other child mutter "sorry" while glowering at his shoes pretty much never makes the recipient of the apology feel better. Turbulent emotions take a long time to settle. We need to give kids that time.

 

Zero Tolerance for Forgetfulness:  I forget sometimes that not only are my students human, they’re really young humans. When they lose their lunch tag for the third day in a row, or ask the exact same question two other kids asked 30 seconds ago, we need to take a deep breath and offer them a sizeable dollop of grace.

 

Kids are kids, and that’s exactly who they should be. We need to think hard about the demands we place on our students. Just because they obey the strictures we lay down doesn’t mean those edicts are fair.

We can’t expect the children in our care to behave like miniature adults. They need to move around more than we do. They need to make more noise than we do. They need to experience new concepts with their fingers, senses, and imaginative ability to consider not just the world as it is, but as it could be. Their curiosity, enthusiasm, and sense of wonder will never lend itself to straight lines and silent deskwork.

We spend so much time bending them to our way of doing things. We should pay more attention to theirs.