The start of the new school year is an opportunity to establish new connections with a different set of students and start afresh. Starting fresh means applying the latest methods, teaching new lessons, and setting new goals. It also means establishing routines and ground rules to build a classroom culture that facilitates learning.
Rules and routines are important and necessary: for classrooms and the school building. They keep the school flowing and they also keep students safe. However, here is a pivotal warning for educators: Don’t let your first interaction with kids this year be a police interaction.
When students arrive at school that first day, and every day, behavioral procedures and processes can’t be the initial interaction between schools and students (and families). Students shouldn’t be met with metal detectors before being met with a hello. Students shouldn’t be met with cell phone pouches before being met with a smile. Perceived suspicious activity or behavior shouldn’t be why you speak to a student or a group of students before conversing to build relationships with them.
Educators often speak of the desire to build relationships with students and the struggle to do so, yet fail to consider how they interact with students upon their initial encounter. Relationship and connection are buzzwords we aspire to achieve. Meanwhile, law and order are the buzzwords we live.
Educators carrying out law and order with a smile is nothing more than community policing. Community policing is a buzz phrase that distracts from the need for law enforcement to simply not kill Black people. Black children don’t need law and order with a smile. They need educators who will not harm them.
Yet a police interaction upon their arrival to school is traumatic and it doesn’t build a relationship. Those interactions facilitate tension that turns into terror and becomes trauma. To be clear, Rules and procedures are important.
For schools to run and run well, there must be order and procedure that the students (and the adults) adhere to. But notice I said that enforcing these cannot be your initial interaction with children. When you greet children, greet them with a good morning and a smile. If you have a handshake or dap, do that. Let the kids socialize a bit; let the day start with kid conversation and laughter.
There’ll be plenty of opportunities to remind kids of the rules.
Setting expectations and instructing on procedures and routines is so that you don’t have to police students. My classroom is not a free-for-all. Rules and routines are clearly and firmly established. But they are the backdrop of our interaction. The learning is at the forefront of what we do. The hook for student learning is that we learn the history the power structure doesn’t want to be taught.
The students know they’re in on a secret; that our learning is resistance.
My goal is to shift who and what they resist. Rather than resist me or the school, I want them to resist oppression—of the mind—and the repression of information. Classroom instruction must invest in the lives of students and the community so that rules and procedures have a purpose. If it’s rooted in maintaining law and order, it perpetuates the belief of so many children that school is like a jail. Having a police officer in the building doesn’t help, but I digress.
But if routines and rules are rooted as parameters for building up young people and community, now you’re—as the elders say—cooking with gas.
Building up young people and the community requires acquiring the trust of young people and the community. Policing them isn’t how you acquire it—especially the first time you meet. Gaining trust starts with a smile, a hello, a good morning, and ushering in young people and their families to a building that is a haven and refuge from a society that is anti-Black, anti-poor, anti-woman, anti-Muslim, anti-LGBTQ… Don’t start the year off being anti-student.
Start the year by expressing through one’s behavior that educators aren’t here to police, but to teach. Communicate that to teach, there must be order and decorum. However, remind students (and educators) that order and decorum help achieve the goal of learning for liberation, not learning for compliance.
