Think of them as life jackets in the stormy seas of life.

“What matters most in a child learning from you can’t actually be taught. It has to be felt. If we recognized that, I think it would shift how we teach, how we arrange a classroom, where we put our bodies in terms of walking the halls. We focus so much on the concrete stuff that we’ve lost sight of all the invisible things that make learning possible, like relationships, like emotions.”

— Dr. Deborah MacNamara

Our guest

Dr. Deborah MacNamara is on Faculty at the Neufeld Institute, and serves as the Director of “Kid’s Best Bet Counseling Center.” She is the author of Rest, Play, Grow: Making Sense of Preschoolers (Or Anyone Who Acts Like One), which has been translated into 13 languages. She makes sense of kids and the adults who are responsible for them through developmental science.

Why this conversation matters

As one of our colleagues once noted, “For a variety of reasons, school leaders often find themselves downstream, picking staff out of the river, instead of going to the headwaters and keeping them out of the river in the first place.”

It’s an interesting analogy given what school leaders may sense they’re going to face this fall:
> lingering faculty exhaustion brought on by managing the last year and a half under the cloud of COVID, and
> the relentless academic push which manifests itself in the fear of students’ loss of learning and the need to quickly bring them up to grade. It can also hijack student development and negatively impact performance.

So the question is, how can leaders help teachers upstream? How can they turn down the volume on this idea of the loss of learning, which may lead many teachers to adopt a feeling of personal incompetence, i.e., “I am responsible for kids falling behind.” Instead, how can leaders nurture a culture of collective strength, of sustaining rituals?

Listen for

√ The importance of having an orienting plan this fall and the patience as staff, kids and parents adapt to it.

√ Why relationships trump learning and behavior.

√ Examples of collecting rituals, bridging rituals, matchmaking rituals.

√ How a student’s emotional filter if not adequately engaged will prevent learning.

√ How leaders can reduce the “aloneness” they feel as an administrator.

Referenced

Hold On to Your Kids: Why parents Need to Matter More than Peers by Gordon Neufeld

The Idea Centre for Educators - The Neufeld Education Hub. The IDEA Centre has been created to provide a rich array of materials and experiences for educators who wish to gain insight into developmental science and put this paradigm into practice in their day-to-day interactions with the children and youth in their care.

Reclaiming Our Students: Why Children Are More Anxious, Aggressive, and Shut Down Than Ever―And What We Can Do About It by Hannah Beach and Tamara Neufeld Strijack