Home, Sweet Home
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“Home, sweet home.” What does this phrase conjure up for you? Something from your childhood? Maybe it is somewhere you go now to catch your breath? Maybe somewhere special with extended family and friends? Wherever your “home, sweet home” is, I hope that it resonates deeply with you as a place of comfort, safety, and belonging.
This week, I began thinking about how aptly “Home, sweet home” captures the kind of classroom environment we want for our children—the place where they will spend half of their waking hours each school day. This isn't a Pollyannaish desire for everyone to be happy all the time. A sense of safety and belonging gives children the security to take intellectual risks, sustain effort, regulate themselves, and engage more deeply with both their work and their classmates.
In Job One (attach link https://www.lockhartlearning.com/blog/job-one), we explored laying the foundation for a strong community. But community is not built in a single activity or grace-and-courtesy lesson. It is something we must nurture, giving it particular attention at the beginning of the year and then gradually giving it a bit more space as it finds its legs. The focus in these early days is ideally suited to bolstering each individual’s sense of belonging while beginning to define a shared identity for the classroom.
“I Belong Here”
Human beings are social creatures, and elementary children are particularly fascinated by the social world. One of the great developmental tasks of the second plane is exploring and experimenting with the rules of the social world. This experimentation naturally leads children to form small groups with whom they feel safest and most accepted. This happens even in seemingly culturally homogenous classrooms. The trick is to be sure that, while children feel a stronger affinity for some than for others, each child feels that they are valued members of the whole classroom community. Beyond mere acceptance, everyone feels that they have a secure place in the community.
Belonging deepens when children feel free to present their authentic selves. When we humans feel like the metaphorical square peg, we shave off the corners of our persona that keep us from slipping through the round hole. The better answer is to make the hole bigger, so that our square pegs can pass through with all their beautiful edges and corners intact.
Small, Regular Experiences of Being Seen
This can begin in the first moment a child enters the classroom each day, when we greet each child personally. Some have had success with greeting children at the door, giving each child the option of a fist-bump, a side-hug (if allowed), a silly face, or a wave.
A lovely part of daily class meetings offers children the opportunity to share something meaningful in their lives. Some refer to this as “Butterflies and Boulders”, which normalizes the idea that we all have our ups and downs and offers the guide an opportunity to notice when someone may need a little extra care.
On a regular but less frequent basis - perhaps weekly - strong communities celebrate achievements and contributions (large and small). Ultimately, the majority of recognitions should come from the children, but initially the guide needs to model how to recognize a peer or adult. Recognitions might be academic, such as someone mastering all of their multiplication facts, or non-academic, such as recognizing a small group for making a visitor feel welcome. And remember to give children opportunities to celebrate more than accomplishment. Notice kindness. Persistence. Courage. Generosity. The child who quietly makes room for someone else.
“I See Myself Here ”
A great deal has been written lately on the importance of children finding representation of their culture within the classroom. They need to see that this space is “for them”. The focus has rightly been on providing positive, non-stereotypical representations of diverse ethnicities and genders in materials, books, language, and social customs.
Just as important is helping each child feel their individual personality is welcome and valued. Here are a few possibilities that might be woven into work time, especially during the early days, to make diverse abilities and preferences visible and to celebrate them.
o Balance group engagement and individual quiet time. Providing time for 1-person work (silent reading, journaling, completing work, or even listening to a read-aloud) can be refreshing for those who find that social engagement takes a lot of energy. For children who thrive on social engagement, provide opportunities to collaborate over work.
o Provide non-competitive activities that allow children to shine without needing to “win”. These can be at the beginning of the day to get everyone’s blood going or perhaps when the class seems to need a brain break. For example, a short fun-run where children choose whether to run, skip, walk, or jump around the playground.
o Offer children meaningful graphic or artistic options to show their knowledge or their personal interests. Illustrations, graphs, posters, diagrams, and picture stories offer ways to communicate without the heavy reliance on written or spoken language.
o Similarly, provide opportunities to build 3-dimensional creations such as clay sculptures, dioramas, Legos, or even electrical circuits.
o Give children opportunities to use humor and performance as a way of learning to live together. For example, when establishing classroom norms, children delight in acting out a "bad behavior" and then re-enacting the same scenario with more appropriate responses.
“We Belong Together”
A learning community is more than a collection of children who each feel that they belong. True community happens when each member knows that they matter to the group and the group matters to them. Many practices in a Montessori classroom naturally give children opportunities to experience this interdependency: peer-to-peer teaching, class decision-making and problem-solving, class jobs, and class meetings with child-generated topics, to name but a few. Here are a few more ideas that may spark something for your community
Practice “Granular Gratitude”. As young children, most of us were all taught to say “thank you” as a matter of courtesy. Granular Gratitude goes beyond “thank you” to specifically name the act. “Thank you for helping me clean up my work.” There are hidden benefits to this simple act. It makes the invisible contributions of other people visible, and it creates a small moment of connection between giver and receiver. Want to boost this in the classroom?
o Have a supply of small thank-you tickets on the supply shelf, suitable for even the youngest child to sign their name and give it to another child. Older children can write a sentence saying specifically why they feel gratitude.
o Start a class gratitude list on flipchart paper and review the list at class meetings. Older children can keep a personal Gratitude Journal.
o Model expressing your own gratitude!
Value Giving and Accepting Service Equally. Many of us find it easier to be of service than to accept it from others. Receiving can require vulnerability and humility, to admit that we have needs that we can’t meet on our own. Discuss acts of kindness (from literature, current events, or classroom happenings) from the perspectives of the giver and the receiver. This helps children recognize the value of both sides of service. For example, we might express admiration for the mindfulness of the giver and the courage of the receiver. In so doing, we strengthen children’s empathy and help them understand that communities depend on both giving and receiving.
Teach Collaborative Processes. Collaboration is a skill, not simply a grouping of children, and it needs to be taught. Children’s initial experience with collaboration may come from working with a partner on a material. This is a great place to practice assigning roles and then swapping them. In math, for example, one child can manipulate the materials, one acts as “the bank”, while one is the recorder. After the first problem, they swap roles.
Ultimately, these practices help establish the community’s common values and transform “I belong here” into “we belong together”.
“This is Who We Are”
Vibrant learning communities take this one step further. Members share responsibility, purpose, and a sense of who they are together. These grow over time through discussions, academic and service projects, shared goals, and opportunities to represent the school beyond its walls. It is also built through traditions: beloved activities, recognitions, celebrations, and rites of passage. Your traditions will be your own, shaped by the shared experiences of your children. Some may not even be overtly named, yet they become the very fabric of the community–and often among the most fondly remembered once our children go on to new adventures.
“One can speak of a true community only when each member of the group feels sufficiently free to be himself or herself, while simultaneously restricting his or her own freedom for the sake of adjustment to the group. It is in seeking an optimal solution to this tension between personal independence and dependence on the group that the social being is formed. Too much individual freedom leads to chaos; too much uniformity … leads to impersonal conformity or to rebellion”
- Mario Montessori, Jr., Education for Human Development