Teaching Kids the Right Way to Say 'I'm Sorry'

This week's article summary is Teaching Kids the Right Way to Say 'I'm Sorry.'

As we move into the second month of school, disagreements and misbehavior between and among students in the classroom, in the hallways, and at recess will inevitably arise.

This article focuses on the importance of sincerity in an apology.

Too often through the years as a teacher and school administrator, I’ve required kids to apologize to one another for some transgression: they robotically said “I’m sorry” followed by an indifferent handshake. I knew these apologies were hollow, yet I felt I needed to manufacture some sort of closure so all of us could just move on to more important matters. In those situations it was the outcome not the process that was important.

But just like last week’s article summary on short and long term lessons, process is critical to learning and understanding. It takes a lot of time, discussion, and even role playing for kids to be truly be sorry and then to express it sincerely.

The fifth grade teacher referenced in the article spends much time during morning meeting/community-building time in developing her students’ understanding and the steps of an apology. Authentically thinking and acting with empathy, her students are more able to see the perspectives and feelings of others.

As the honeymoon period of the school year wanes, we need to take even more teaching opportunities when kids start to misbehave--and a sincere apology helps in both the short and long term.

 Joe

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It’s a common scenario – one that plays out in schools and homes all the time. A child hurts another child, physically or emotionally. Grownups are called in to arbitrate. The adult tells one – or perhaps all – of the kids to say, “I’m sorry.” Those two words are uttered, and all is supposed to be well. 

But the resolution is often lopsided. “When you just do that quick apology, you feel better, you move on,” said fifth grade teacher Rayna Freedman. “But oftentimes the other person is still left with a bucket of feelings.” She sees it all the time in her classroom in Mansfield, Massachusetts. 

That’s why, for the last few years, she’s been teaching her students how to give more meaningful apologies. During these lessons, the fifth graders practice not only saying “I’m sorry,” but acknowledging why their actions were wrong, offering to repair harm, and promising not to repeat the behavior.

Effective apologies require empathy, perspective-taking, honesty and courage – all qualities that schools and parents try to cultivate in children. Freedman has seen that teaching how to apologize well changes her students’ interactions with each other and with her for the better. “These types of lessons really build empathy in kids because now they’re able to clearly understand that even though I don’t or might not realize I did something wrong, I still hurt this other human being somehow,” she said. 

Explicit lessons on giving good apologies are rare for kids, and they live in a world full of adults who aren’t great at the task, either. “I think there are lots of people who just think of an apology as something that mean people force you to do,” said Susan McCarthy, co-author of Sorry, Sorry, Sorry: The Case for Good Apologies. 

McCarthy also pens SorryWatch, a website that analyzes apologies in the news, pop culture and history. SorryWatch is full of examples of bad apologies, such as actors who tweet ‘I’m sorry if.’ Good apologies are rare, but they don’t have to be. “The nice thing about good apologies is that the form is actually really simple. It’s the doing it that is hard, not the steps themselves.”

Like most hard things, apologizing is easier when you’ve had practice. In Freedman’s fifth grade class, she teaches seven steps to a meaningful apology.

Freedman teaches the lessons during morning meetings, a period when her class does community-building activities. She covers one step per day, and students role-play with made-up scenarios, such as tripping a classmate at recess or plagiarizing their homework.

For most students, steps like saying why their behavior was wrong and asking “How can I make this better?” are new terrain. “Just getting them to talk and have a conversation about it and be in that driver’s seat to practice is huge because you can’t just teach them a step and then not actually have them practice it and use it,” Freedman said.

In addition to role-playing, students discuss why the steps matter, what bad apologies sound like, and how it feels to receive good and bad apologies. They also talk about the difference between when they want to apologize and when they’re told to apologize. For Freedman, that’s important because there’s no point in apologizing if they haven’t truly accepted responsibility. It’s also important because not every instance someone demands or expects an apology from another person is valid.

McCarthy said that not listening to kids is one of several common mistakes adults make when teaching kids to say “I’m sorry.” Others include:

• Not modeling good apologies. This can mean giving bad apologies or just doing their apologies in private where kids don’t get to see and hear them.
• Scolding children after they’ve apologized. This creates an association in the child’s memory between apologizing and being reprimanded, making them less inclined to apologize in the future.
• Requiring kids to kiss or hug after an apology. “Apologies are with words, not with touching.”

Throughout her lessons, Freedman shares apology examples from her own life. She said that hearing her stories and each others’ experiences is validating for students. It also normalizes screwing up sometimes while building skills to move forward from those mistakes.

“I think the whole thing with going through this is that it’s humbling, right?” she said. “It’s teaching people to accept responsibility for something they’ve done. And not everybody can do that.” After these lessons, her fifth graders can. Freedman has seen students put the steps into practice in her classroom and on the playground.

“I feel that I am teaching kids life skills beyond how to solve a math problem or how to read and decode a text,” she said. “Those are the things that – state standards, Common Core – that we have to teach. But I teach humans.”

Humans make mistakes. And to make things better, humans apologize.