Improving Middle and High School Climate With the Four Tools
Long before I was a consultant and a psychotherapist, I was a middle school teacher in a military town. I taught 12-13 year old students language arts and social studies. I was one of the teachers who had students on Individualized Education Plans for behavior in my classroom and was fortunate to have the paraeducators of all paraeducators, Anita. She was wonderful.
I had animals in my classroom, including guinea pigs that had babies. One afternoon I received a phone call from the parent of one of my kids. She asked me if I had given her son one of the baby guinea pigs. I had not. It turned out that he had snuck one of the babies home in his jacket! I’ve delighted in that story for years because I feel it points to something really important that my students experienced in my classrooms — safety, a feeling that they were welcomed and belonged. One of my most memorable comments from my administrator on that year’s evaluation was: “Robin has somehow made her classes feel like a family.”
When I taught in an urban alternative high school program and the program was threatened, the students and parents rallied, met with school admininstrators, and advocated fiercely for the continuation of the program. We, too, were like a family. We all felt like we belonged, and we were invested.
How does it happen that students feel they belong and want to be there in your classroom, in your school, and that they would fight for their school?
What is school climate?
One thing educators, school personnel, and school administrators should always keep at the forefront of awareness: we would not have a school if it were not for the students. The school and all that word encompasses exist to be in service to the children as learners. A healthy school climate is imperative for our students to be successful. Where there are adolescents, there will be unique challenges to school climate, so let’s focus on secondary schools and how to get kids invested.
Negative school climate has been shown to correlate with more than a few serious negative outcomes for students, including high absenteeism, decreased graduation rates, behavior problems, and increased reports of student depression, anxiety, and suicide. Research shows that negative school climate affects the teacher shortage, which is now reaching a crisis point.
Finding ways to improve and maintain school climate is a worthwhile task. Though school climate is complex, we can outline a few key points here. The National School Climate Center gives five areas that any school climate assessment should include:
safety,
interpersonal relationships,
social media safety,
teaching and learning,
and school connectedness.
The four tools of The Shiftless Wanderer can support each of these categories. In fact, I propose that they are foundational for a positive, healthy school climate.
The process and practice of validation
A healthy school climate is a result of a validating ecology. Knowing how to have validating interactions between and amongst staff, students, families, and the larger community lays the foundation for navigating the inevitable conflicts, challenges, and heartache that come from being in a learning community with teenagers.
To validate is to be with the other person in such a way that they have the embodied feeling of being seen, heard, accepted, valued, and loved/cared for in the moment as they are. Imagine an entire school population having multiple daily experiences like this. Not just the students but the teachers, the secretaries, the bus drivers, the lunchroom staff, and the custodians.
The number one reason that the adolescents I work with give for their acting out behavior is that they don’t feel heard or respected. Validation empowers the one who is validated and the one who is doing the validating. The process I teach not only validates the other person, but it is a self-validating process. The potential time and resources saved by learning how to validate and build a validating ecology are enormous.
Compassionate curiosity
While this tool is also a part of the validation process, it can be a stand-alone communication tool in just about every interaction. Compassionate curiosity is asking questions to connect rather than to correct. It is to engage with someone with the assumption that each of us is doing our best and has good intentions, though the impact may be a negative one. Having a compassionately curious conversation with a student who is causing a problem is to get to the heart of the issue, the intention. Is it to be heard? Respected? To create change? Then the problem can be effectively resolved.
Compassionate curiosity is about building relationships, one of the core tenets of a positive school climate. It promotes school connectedness, predicts improved student mental health, and “provides the optimal foundation for social, emotional, and academic learning.”
Love and courage as antidotes to fear
If we are talking about adolescents, almost always close behind is fear. The risk-taking, acting out, and boundary-pushing behaviors at this age can intimidate and concern the savviest and most stalwart of educators and staff. I often compared being in middle and high school environments to sitting on top of an active volcano. Adolescent energy is invigorating, dramatic, exciting, and agitative.
Given our youth's current mental health crisis, there is much to fear there as well. Our fears for our adolescents are valid. Always. However, making decisions from a state of fear rarely goes well. With fear come the parts of us that react and attempt to control, shield, fix, prevent, and perhaps even suppress what is often necessary and normal in adolescence. These are valid reactions but tend to be ineffective in the long run.
By managing our anxieties and becoming courageous leaders in our school communities, there is room for strengths-based responses. Collaborative problem-solving, creative outside-the-box ideas, appropriate risk-taking, and challenges create relevant growth and learning opportunities for students and staff alike. Adolescents thrive in these learning environments and are likely to be much more invested in their school program.
Understanding the essential nature of Adolescence
I believe it is impossible to have a healthy secondary school climate without understanding what it means to be an adolescent and what is happening to children as they ‘adolesce.’ If all of the adults in a school environment—not just the teachers— are unfamiliar with normal adolescent development and behavior, then that behavior gets pathologized. It must now be fixed, eradicated, punished, and/or adjudicated.
To understand the essential nature of Adolescence is to know how to be in relationship with these kids so we, as some of the most important adults in this period of their lives, can support, mentor, scaffold, guide, companion, respect, and celebrate them. We have the bandwidth now to delight in them! Talk about a positive school climate!
Making it reality
Healthy and positive school climates are imperative with the emergent youth mental health crisis and the tragic reports of school mass shootings. It is completely within the realm of possibility to create such a learning community, a place where kids belong and know they belong, a place that can sometimes feel like family.
Photo by Eddie Cloud