Who has the POWER?!

This past month has been a struggle, to say the least.  There have been days that I’ve left school thinking, “what just happened?”.  Some days I think this because it was a really beautiful day and the kids just all got along, or were able to really get a specific strategy or skill I was teaching.  Some days I don’t know what happened because it was a really hard day for the kids conflict wise, or just because I, myself, was struggling.  Either way, the really beautiful thing I find about teaching is that it truly is new everyday. And with each new day comes a new wonderful, fascinating, spectacular thing as well as a difficult, horrible, tiring thing. It’s exhausting and exhilarating to be a teacher, because we are always going from the valleys to the mountains.  To that point, it’s exhausting and exhilarating to be a kid too! They travel up and down with us.   

As I look back at my highs from this month, I have to say that I’m most proud of how conflict is being handled by my students.  Of course I’m proud of their writing, reading, and math skills.  But I LOVE watching them have meaningful moments with each other and use those negotiating skills.  Ever since a class meeting we had for Language and Literacy, I’ve been ruminating over this idea of “Who has the power in my classroom?”.  Am I the teacher with all the skills and proficiencies and my students are just so lucky to have me to guide them? OR, am I the teacher who gets to support these brilliant, little capable children and scaffold their conflict resolution skills? To be honest, this month there has been an internal tension between these two ideas.  I have been that teacher that “looses control” and gets frustrated and yells at my students.  And I have been that understanding, reassuring presence that lets them make mistakes and gently leads them into proper negotiating.  

One of the things I personally started doing, at the advice of Dr. Lynch after a coaching session was trying to empower those students that weren’t exhibiting any of the negotiating skills that they need to be effective conflict resolvers.  One of my students (Edgar) in particular had a kind of helplessness and powerless about him that was hard for me to see.  After Dr. Lynch pointed this out, I began to be more attentive to Edgar’s struggle.  I noticed, that although he was completely capable of doing things for himself, he wasn’t.  I wondered why this was, was it because he didn’t feel the power to do it? Was he being enabled by adults (or even teachers) in his life? The first time I noticed him having trouble was over putting a simple board puzzle back together and putting it on the shelf. Sounds simple right? For me, I couldn’t even believe this was a problem for him because he is incredibly bright and high achieving.  So as he began to get frustrated and upset that he couldn’t get it together. I started to ask him, “what do you think you can do to put this puzzle together?” And we had this dialogue of how he could get it together for the next 10 minutes. And here’s the success story--he got it together! And guess who didn’t help him at all? I only asked him what HE could do.  I don’t know if this resonates with any of you out there, but I put this down as a high for me.  How could a small child putting a very simple 5 piece board puzzle back together be a high for me? Well, when I stepped back and looked at this situation more broadly, I realized that Edgar was doing this A LOT.  With so many things, especially relating to school work.  He was constantly waiting for someone else to do these things for him.  I think I learned an important lesson from Edgar about letting children be in control of things they can be in control of.  

Another implementation in our classroom that has really changed the dynamic of our class for the better has been jobs.  I wasn’t too big on jobs in the beginning of the school year because I really just thought, this is going to take up so much time.  I will have to instruct the children everyday all day about how to do their job.  I thought, jobs aren’t helpful.  After reading in Conscious Discipline, “each child in the classroom should hold a job.  These jobs contribute to the functioning of the classroom and the health of the school family”(Bailey, 2000, p. 67), I began to wonder if maybe we’ve been missing out on jobs. We began the task of dreaming up 22 meaningful jobs for my students.  These jobs have been SO beautiful to see the children perform.  Just to highlight a few: 

Energy Manager: In charge of putting oxygen in our brains either through breathing and stress relieving techniques, music and movement, or exercise.  They also ask everyone how they are feeling in the morning, why they feel this way, and if they are feeling bad if there is anything we can do as a class to help them feel better.  This is probably one of my favorite things we do everyday and it’s incredibly beautiful to see students take interest in their classmates feelings.  

Hamster Veterinarian: Our class hamster, Mr. Cho Bing is very well taken care of thanks to this job.  He is observed daily and the veterinarian records their observations and tells the other students about Mr. Cho Bing.  They are also in charge of feeding and cleaning his cage (with teacher help).  This idea was presented to me by my DRC group (Kimela, Brandi, and Issiah), for my animal expert student to help her feel more confident and empowered in our classroom.  

Kindness Reporter: This student’s job is to tell me about the kindness they witness in the classroom daily, we record it and put it in a binder.  We read the kindness report everyday at the end of the day and kiss our brains for being good friends.  I intentionally chose a student that had a lot of conflict with peers to be the kindness reporter for their first time to get them interested in kindness and spreading the love! 

Now as for the lows, as I look back over this past month, my lows have also had to do with conflict with students in the classroom.  I’ve been thinking about what Conscious Discipline says, “When classroom conflict becomes the core of the social-emotional curriculum, children learn valuable social skills, develop self-discipline and self-control, and are able to focus on schoolwork more effectively” (Bailey, 2000, p. 16).  This statement has been so important to me as I try to effectively implement a healthy discipline for my students and help them resolve conflict in a healthy way with their peers.  For several students in particular, this has been very difficult, and I must admit, I’ve been pretty discouraged.  As much as I see the progress of the whole class and some students, I see the stagnant progress of backwards progress of others.  There have been times when I think, “I’m doing something wrong” or, “I’m missing something here”.  I admit, I don’t know what to do about a child that hits or stomps on other children all day long, every day.  It’s frustrating, because on one had you want to protect the other students in your care, but on the other hand, I really want to figure out what is going on with this particular student and help them with their stress level.  

I guess at the end of the day, what’s important in my classroom is that my students feel empowered in their relationships with their peers and with me.  I’m still learning how to do this effectively.  We’re a work in progress!