2019 Part 2: Rules to Live By

Shortly after starting the 2019 school year, I met in small groups with teachers, students, and parents to talk about a few simple rules that, if adopted by all, could help to make our community a more emotionally safe and academically sound place of learning, living, and working for all. These are those rules:

• Rule 1: Focus on the students. As I shared in an earlier post, my purpose, or “why,” is to help others be and become their best selves. To put it another way, it’s not about me. So, as I spoke with teachers and parents I reminded them that our school is student-centered in our decision-making, programs, and policies. We don’t do things just because they are easy, convenient, or just the way they’ve always been done. We make decisions based on what best serves students’ social, emotional, and academic needs. We choose practices and programs that allow students to choose problems/questions/issues they are interested in and feel are relevant to them. We remain open to solutions that might not match the choices we anticipated or have heard before. We get to know our students and their needs, and we meet them where they are in order to help them challenge themselves and their peers. We assess each student based on set criteria and standards, and we assess them not based on the work of others (competition) but on their individual capacity to master the material and work in teams (collaboration). We support them in taking risks and in failing forward, because this is how we learn. And we recognize that learning takes place not just in the classrooms but everywhere, all of the time. So, we promote balance and not just academic progress but a capacity and/or appreciation of the Arts, athletics, and the environment. I also shared this same message with our students, and when doing so reminded them that “student-centered” is not the same thing as “just give them what they want.” Struggle is indeed a part of learning, and students should be allowed to grapple with real issues, real questions, and real work. Of course we are there to support them, but it is the students who have to take ownership of their learning.

• Rule 2: Assume good intent.​ This is the thing, we all tell stories. Someone cuts me off in traffic and I think about how thoughtless they are. Someone takes the last snack from the refrigerator and I think about how selfish that is. Someone doesn’t respond immediately to my email and I think about how foolish I was to send it. And on and on. But what if the person who cut me off in traffic is just trying to get to the hospital to visit a very sick loved one, or the person who took the last snack was just looking for something to share with the local food bank, or the person who hasn’t yet responded to that email is just in the middle of a very, very busy day? Instead of making up stories, what if we just remind ourselves that, almost always, the other person is just doing the very best they can with what they have to deal with that day? In a school, we see this play out every day. Sometimes parents assume teachers don’t care about their kids, other times teachers assume students don’t care about their learning, and frequently students assume no one cares about what they want at all. So I spoke to all of them about taking a pause, assuming the other person was doing the very best that they could with whatever it was that they were tasked with, and when in doubt to ask politely for an explanation. Put another way, I asked teachers, students, and parents to “seek first to understand.”

• Rule 3: Choose your own adventure.​ I loved these books when I was a kid, the ones where you got to a certain point in the story and chose what the character would do next. The thing is, this is how real-life works everyday; we just somehow seem to forget. So I reminded students that, while they can’t always choose the situation (yes, they have to go to school), they can certainly choose their actions. They can choose each day how to approach their learning, and so too the level of effort they choose to put into studying, the words they choose when speaking to others, the activities in which they choose to participate, and on and on. It’s empowering really, to remind oneself of the choices we can make. But a blessing can be a curse…

• Rule 4: If it’s yours, own it.​ This is the other side of the “choice” coin: I reminded students, teachers, and parents that we have to “own” our choices and also their consequences. This is only fair, and it is also how we learn. If a student chooses to be late, to miss an assignment, to behave inappropriately, etc. we have to let them feel the consequence of that choice so that they can learn for themselves to make a different choice the next time. As a parent myself, I know how hard this can be. We want to save our babies from pain and discomfort. It’s natural, but not necessarily best for their growth and development. And so I spoke to parents about providing their students the opportunity to learn from the consequences of their decisions both good and bad. I spoke to students about owning (and learning from) their choices and their consequences. And I spoke to teachers about the same.

• Rule 5: Empathize, with boundaries.​ I spent the summer of 2019 reading every book, listening to every podcast, and watching every TedTalk I could find with Brene Brown. I considered getting a tattoo saying “Dare Greatly” on my forearm (true story, but I ultimately didn’t, yet) and I went around spreading the good word for months. I’m a disciple. And so I had to include at least one of her lessons here. What I told our students, their parents, and our teachers was simple: of course we empathize with our students (and their families) and we will do whatever needs be done to support them, but we will not simply take another’s pain as our own. Really this is an extension of Rule Four, but it’s an important addendum to that idea. If you make a mistake I am here to support you. I still love you, because you are not your mistakes. But I will not pretend it isn’t there, and I will not make it mine.

• Rule 6: Be kind, always. No, I am certainly not the first to say this, but I hope I am also not the last. We (students, teacher, parents, administrators, support staff, etc.) spend A LOT of time together. We are, in so many ways, a family. Most times we will agree, some times we will not, but we should always treat one another with respect and kindness. And there’s not really much more I want to say to over-complicate that simple, but profound, message.

These were good talks. In all of them, whether with students, teachers, or parents there were nods of agreement and questions for clarification. And in all of them I think we left the room with a better understanding of who we are, why we are together, what we need, and how we want to treat and be treated by one another. I know I felt great about our start to 2019 and the school year that lay ahead.

Of course, “pandemic” wasn’t a part of my everyday vocabulary at the time, and I couldn’t have guessed how radically our lives were going to change in seven months. But I also feel that the foundations we developed here carried us through that turmoil. When the time came for us to close our campus and transition to virtual learning we did so with a focus on our students and their needs, and with an understanding that we were going to assume that everyone was doing the best they could with the stress of the situation. We made clear that we would support students every way we could, but also that we expected them to behave responsibly and with accountability. And mostly, we stayed kind. What else is there?