Unhappy Ending - How Did We Get Here and What Can We Do?

With all of the energy and attention put into any given school year, how is it that we end up with an unhappy ending to a school year for so many students?

School years come to an end with a string of celebrations - promotion ceremonies, graduation caps and gowns, prom, senior breakfasts, and the rest. The last few weeks can be filled with field day, Reader’s Night, Grade 6 field trip, Honor’s Assemblies, class parties and so many other culminating activities that the routine and ritual of learning starts to feel far away and like something of last year. Final projects, presentations, and exams are mixed in amongst the revelry. A balance of stress and silliness.

Students who have been excluded from events face the sunny days and sugary treats knowing that at least one part of school is not for them. And the celebrations are usually not the only place they were turned away from as the year unfolded. The most final rejection can come with their name on the “no-admit” list for a string of the things that bring the whole community together at the end of the year. And you find yourself the leader of this school. 

One year, embarrassingly unbeknownst to me, a group of teachers thought to bring all the 8th-grade students into the gym and sort them publicly into those who would walk the stage at the promotion ceremony and those who wouldn’t. One of the 8th-grade boys who had steadily been improving his grades came directly to my office to voice the injustice. The moment I heard what happened, I was off to find the group. The students in all grades had amassed on the yard to make their way to happier conversation with this being the final action the teachers took that day before sending the students home. I met with the teachers involved, sitting at student desks in a room with student work that hadn’t been changed since the new year. Three of the teachers defended the “tough love” of their public shaming and claimed it was only fair - those were the rules. We agreed on a very public apology by the teachers to the students, but the sting of that moment, the way the people they saw every day could cruelly turn on them in the name of a “life lesson” couldn’t have faded quickly away. No words over a microphone could mend the menacing message about school and authority that came from the sorting. 

You’re likely at a campus with this same problem because this is how our traditional discipline and authority structure at schools is set up. The handbook outlines a number of offenses, quantifies the times you can make a mistake, and dangles the consequence over the heads of students all year long.

But kids aren’t robotic and neither are we. We have bad days, we make poor judgment calls, and we make biased (even unknowingly) assessments of students’ conduct. But the final rule for participating in X, Y, and Z things comes down to expecting children and adolescents not to act. . .  like children and adolescents. 

Being able to focus, hold, and work with information in mind, filter distractions, and switch gears is like having an air traffic control system at a busy airport to manage the arrivals and departures of dozens of planes on multiple runways. In the brain, this air traffic control mechanism is called executive function.

Executive function and self-regulation skills depend on three types of brain function: working memory, mental flexibility, and self-control. These functions are highly interrelated, and the successful application of executive function skills requires them to operate in coordination with each other. - Harvard Center for Developing Child

Before you tag out of this post with a “Are you saying there should be no rules??!!!??” No, I am not. Boundaries serve us all. Knowing the edges that we need to contain ourselves in a school setting serves the community. Part of supporting youth in their development of self-regulation and executive functioning skills IS putting clear boundaries in place. The challenge we all face is that many of these boundaries don’t come with any bounce or give. How does the school respond to help a student learn how to approach the boundary that they flew by last time? Beyond “don’t do that!”, how can a school teach, constructively and in a developmentally appropriate way, a new way to approach the boundary in the future?

If you do an honest self-assessment of your school community and systems, how many places can you find a focused, concerted effort to support students, over time to learn self-regulation and executive functioning explicitly for the skills you know they need? How often are students left with a warning, an escalation, or a “total number of offenses” as the path from their mistake to their exclusion? 

What you can do?

Start with a mental exercise - consider one place in your school where kids have been excluded due to some conduct or cumulation of offenses. On your own, map out the flow of events and what you know about the situation. The question you are exploring is “How Did We Get Here?” with curiosity and non-judgment.  At this point, this is purely a mental exercise for you. If you are thinking about which 8th graders are excluded from the 8th-grade field day party, look at the reason why. Grades? Tardies? Minor conflicts? Major conflicts? Now, make a flow chart like the one below and move backward from the decision to exclude. 

Get Honest about the Support - It is true that many times there is a consistent and comprehensive plan in place to support a student to learn a new way of handling a situation (ex. getting to class after lunch, submitting work, seeking conflict resolution, etc.) and, in those cases, the student has truly been supported and having a clear consequence delivered with respect will help them on their path to mature. However, all too often, multiple things are going on:

•  there is a plan, but it’s not instructive or developmental. For example, students are told a rule and given a reflection sheet when a rule is broken but don’t have the skills or model to draw from to practice during reflection. The skill is not modeled and supported over time with the student. 
• in one part of the school day, or with one set of adults, the student has a calm and responsive classroom environment and a place where the new skill is modeled and supported but that isn’t the case in one or more other parts of the day. The chaos, hostility, or tension of that one teacher or staff member then interferes with how the student responds when they reach their limit of patience. 
• adults put something in place that they call support (Check-in/Check-Out, a plan for a teacher to sign a planner), but it is an action and not a plan. Meaning, it involves more repetition of a rule the student already doesn’t have the skills to follow and no modeling of how to approach a situation or respond differently. The student feels “good” when they do the right thing and confused when they don’t. New executive functioning or self-regulation skills aren’t learned. 

Consider what this means for you as a leader - It’s the last few weeks of school and you have to consider what political capital you have to use. Given what you see about what came before the final consequence to exclude a student, what is within your sphere of influence to change? What conversations can you have that might be more inclusive, clear, and supportive? What groundwork do you want to lay for the coming school year? Where are you seeing patterns of exclusion? How do those patterns show you have systemic oppression and bias show up on your site?

It brings us back to the question - how do you end a year badly? 

As a leader, your goal is for that not to be the case for any student, staff member, or even yourself. Even if you find yourself in a situation where harm has been done, what can you do to help restore that connection to a caring school community for the students on the “non-attendance” list for your events? What can you do to model how to think about behavior developmentally and with an eye to how consistently we work to teach kids?

What can you do so that students end the year with a personal and positive message from you?