The Problem With Memory

I've been married to my wife Jennifer for 38 years and during that time we've shared a lot of experiences, side-by-side, the difference in our relative perspectives only a matter of degrees, yet we still regularly find ourself disagreeing about what we saw, heard, touched, tasted, or smelled. Often, it's a simple matter of whether someone was wearing a red or green shirt, but other times our memories differ about matters of great moment. Indeed, there are some things that I remember with clarity, moments in which something significant happened, that she hardly remembers at all, and vice versa.

The older I've gotten, the less certain I've become about the objective accuracy of my memories. Or rather, I find myself questioning the concept of object accuracy altogether. Yes, something in the past happened, but it only exists for me as the form it imprints upon my brain. But not even that. Researchers have discovered that we are constantly making and re-making our memories. Each time we recall something, they tell us, it becomes altered in some way. The more we recall something, the more we tend to change it until our memories very often only have a passing resemblance to what actually, objectively, happened.

This is a recognized phenomenon in law, for instance, as eye witnesses can credibly report seeing the same thing in different ways. It's why contemporaneous comments or writing about an event is often accepted as stronger evidence than oral testimony, under the assumption that one was created closer in time to the actual, objective events.

We tend to think of memories as a kind of recording of what happened, but in reality, what we "remember" is actually something our brains have constructed, and continue to construct even long after the arrow of time has swept us off into the future. As educator Eleanor Duckworth writes, "(W)e cannot assume that an experience whose meaning seems clear to us will have the same meaning for someone else."

This is why we don't all think, for instance, that The Catcher in the Rye is a great novel. For many, it's work of genius, perhaps the great American novel, while for others it's a real yawner. Our brains do not record events, but rather shape and interpret them from the very start. For instance, if an English teacher has forced me to read Salinger's novel (which happened thrice during my years of formal education) my brain will store the experience completely differently than when I choose to read it of my own accord. 

This is the big challenge for most teachers, those charged with the task of somehow working through a standardized curriculum. The expectation is that if we expose all the children to the same experience they will learn the same thing. We cannot assume this, not about children, not about anyone. Perhaps some will have the experience we expect, but most won't. They can, however, learn to create the illusion that they have had the "right" experience by getting the "right" answers on a test, which is the real lesson of school for most children. Oh, they are all learning something, but what that is specifically is different for each child and is most certainly not the lesson intended by the teacher or the curriculum.

Even before the pandemic, polling found that teaching is one of the most stressful occupations in the U.S., tied only with nursing. (You can find the 2013 poll here, although you will have to download it to read it.) And it has only, of course, gotten worse during the past year. In my decades in the classroom, I had my moments, but by and large I didn't find it particularly stressful, and I attribute that in large measure to the fact that I was never charged with implementing a standardized curriculum. Our play-based program is based on the concept of allowing the curriculum to emerge from the children themselves rather than imposing it on them. The result is that I don't have to pretend the children are learning what I'm teaching. I don't have to spend my energies on such nonsense as "classroom management," which is the equivalent of trying to push water uphill or herd cats. Add to that the fact that teachers are expected to also keep children perfectly safe, serve as therapists, mitigate the impact of a pandemic, and heal the wounds of bigotry and poverty, and it's easy to see why we, as a profession, are so stressed out.

It's all an impossible task, at least the way we now have it set up. And if teachers are unduly stressed, the same must be true of our children. I'm blessed to have worked my entire career in places that don't expect me to do the impossible. When the random benchmarks of standardized curriculum are removed, when we acknowledge that learning is for each child a unique and personal experience, when we stop trying to herd the cats, we find our natural role as important adults in children's lives, which is to care for them, keep them safe enough, and to support them emotionally and intellectually when they need it. That's why most of us, especially in the early years, got into this profession in the first place. 

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In this brand new 6-week course, you will learn how to break the cycle of control, command, punishments, and rewards that have characterized the childhoods of so many of us. If you're ready to transform your classroom management skills so that you are truly supporting every child to get their needs met, and in turn transform challenging behaviors, then please consider joining the inaugural cohort for Controlled Chaos: Teacher Tom's Guide to Play-Based Classroom Management. To learn more and to register, click here.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

Classroom Management Based on Love, Not Power

"You need power only when you want to do something harmful, otherwise love is enough to get everything done." ~Charlie Chaplin

As a younger teacher, I spent a lot of time reading about the education of young children. That's how I came to learn about such child-centered models as Reggio Emilia, Montessori, Waldorf (Steiner), and democratic free schools. It's how I came to know the foundational ideas of Dewey, Piaget, and Vygotsky, and more contemporary thinkers like like Bev Bos, John Holt, and Mister Rogers. But to get to those ideas I had to reject most of what of passes in our profession as "best practices."

"The opposite of Love is not hate, but power." ~C.S. Lewis

What I've come to reject is the idea of adult-centered learning. What I've rejected is the idea that adults must somehow control children in order for them to learn. What I've rejected are approaches that place adult power over children at the center instead of love for children. 

"They fear love because it creates a world they can't control." ~George Orwell

Any model that starts with a curriculum devised by adults "for their own good" is about power over children, not love.

Any model that values tidiness and order under the rubric of "classroom management" is about power instead of love.

Any model that assumes that children will learn little of importance without "teaching" is about power.

"In order to get power and retain it, it is necessary to love power; but love of power is not connected with goodness, but with qualities which are the opposite of goodness, such as pride, cunning, and cruelty." ~Leo Tolstoy

You know you are reading about power when the sentences begin with "Have the children (do this or that) . . ." or "Get the children to . . ." or "Tell the children . . ." These are statements of command, the hallmark of every method that relies upon power.

"When love rules power disappears. When power rules love disappears." ~Paulo Coelho

Methods based upon power can be identified by their rigid schedules, both daily and developmental, in which everyone must constantly worry about "falling behind."

Power predominates in places where adults seek to prepare children for some future life rather than allowing them to live the life they are living.

"Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other." ~Carl Jung

Love does not dictate; love does not manage; love does not need tricks and tips for manipulating children. Love is about connection. It is about relationships. It is about listening. It is about acceptance. It is about this unique and beautiful person. As Mister Rogers wrote, "To love someone is to strive to accept that person exactly the way he or she is, right here and now." That is where child-centered learning begins. Love does not prepare children for life because to love someone is to know that they are already, right here and now, living.

"Love is the opposite of power. That's why we fear it so much." ~Gregory David Roberts

In my new course -- Controlled Chaos: Teacher Tom's Guide to Classroom Management -- we will explore what happens when we place children at the center of their own learning, listening to them, understanding them, and loving them. When we do this, when classroom management is based on love, we are creating a bulwark against power. Through a curriculum based upon love we set children free to think, which is, in the end, the only place real learning happens and where, frankly, the spark of revolution is possible. In a world that values power over love, that can be a frightening thing.

"When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace." ~Jimi Hendrix

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In this brand new 6-week course, you will learn how to break the cycle of control, command, punishments, and rewards that have characterized the childhoods of so many of us. If you're ready to transform your classroom management skills so that you are truly supporting every child to get their needs met, and in turn transform challenging behaviors, then please consider joining the inaugural cohort for Controlled Chaos: Teacher Tom's Guide to Play-Based Classroom Management. To learn more and to register, click here.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

Fruit Grown in the Soil of Obedience

Six-year-old Kaia was arrested because she got in a power struggle with a teacher over wearing sunglasses inside.

Eight-year-old Evelyn was arrested because she wanted to wear a cow hoodie in class.

Seven-year-old Malachi was arrested after a shoving match with another child who had teased him about one of his drawings.

The low-end estimate is that we arrest 130 children between 5 and 9 every year, although the number is probably much higher. Black children make up 43 percent of those arrested even though they only comprise 15 percent of kids in that age range. I don't have data on this, but I expect that autistic children, or children who are otherwise neuro-atypical, are also over-represented in those arrests.

There is never a reason to arrest a child. Ever. Even if they bring a gun to school. Even if they make threats. The criminal justice system will do nothing but harm. 

Kaia's grandmother says that since the arrest she has been watching her granddaughter die "bit by bit, day after day." All of these children have suffered from post-traumatic syndrome, been in therapy, and are fearful of both school and the police. 

I don't blame the teachers. I don't blame the police officers. I blame all of us, you and me included.

We live in a society that enshrines words like "freedom" and "liberty," but our institutions, like schools and the police, are focused, like lasers, on compliance, especially when it comes to children, especially when it comes to Black children. Especially when it comes to children who perceive the world differently. 

Who cares if a child wears sunglasses or a cow hoodie? But of course it wasn't about those things. It's about children who stood their ground, who opted for freedom or liberty over obedience. In other words, they behaved as our myths about ourselves as a nation would have them behave. And for that, the adults in their lives felt they must crush them. 

And I blame myself. I don't work in those schools. Indeed, I've spent more than a decade here as a critic. I'm not a cop. I have never called the cops, even when I arrived to find transients sleeping inside the school or on the playground. Even when one of them threatened me with a stick studded with rusty nails. I didn't call the cops because I feared what they would do in the name of compliance. I have marched in the streets against the excesses of the police. Yet I still blame myself because I live in a society that explicitly values obedience over freedom. 

We are so sick with this that we arrest five-year-old because they feel more comfortable wearing sunglasses indoors.

We are so sick that Kaia's teacher insists that she would never have a child arrested, yet her own student was arrested. We are so sick that the officer who handcuffed Kaia objected that she was a "baby," yet this baby was arrested.

French philosopher Voltaire once said, "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."

Arresting young children, handcuffing them, forcing them into squad cars, booking them, taking mugshots -- all of it -- is an atrocity. And our culture of obedience, of compliance at all costs, even when it's just about sunglasses, cow hoodies, or even a shoving match, is the absurdity that we believe.

I'm certain that some people reading here have already manufactured, in their minds, a way to blame these children or their parents for the arrests. I'm sure that some have thought, "maybe they had it coming" or that sometimes the only thing that works is the companion absurdity of "tough love."

Most of us, I hope, are outraged by the idea of arresting "babies." It's an easy, extreme thing over which to be outraged, but we should be equally outraged over children being required to ask permission to use the toilet or compelled to walk in straight lines through the hallways or to sit quietly in their seats while a teacher drones on about irrelevant things. We should be equally outraged by the assembly line mechanisms by which we process our children, standardizing them through tests and ranking them by grades. We should be equally outraged by a culture that cuts down all the tall poppies, hammers down the nails that stick up, and values classroom management over anything else.

In my brand new 6-week course -- Controlled Chaos: Teacher Tom's Guide to Classroom Management -- we will dive deeply into what we can do in our own classrooms to focus more on freedom and less on knee-jerk compliance.

But how will we ever teach the children if they don't first learn to obey? That is the absurd question that leads to atrocity. Arresting children is the fruit that grows from the soil of obedience.

Freedom, liberty, autonomy: that is what must come first. It must be the highest value if we are to ever become self-governing people. This is what history, science, and experience have to teach us. It will only be when we, as a society, can learn see children as free people that we will finally understand what it means to be free ourselves. Until then, I'm afraid, we will be doomed to commit atrocities in the name of absurdities.

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In this brand new 6-week course, you will learn how to break the cycle of control, command, punishments, and rewards that have characterized the childhoods of so many of us. If you're ready to transform your classroom management skills so that you are truly supporting every child to get their needs met, and in turn transform challenging behaviors, then please consider joining the inaugural cohort for Controlled Chaos: Teacher Tom's Guide to Play-Based Classroom Management. To learn more and to register, click here.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

"Everybody's Had to Fight to be Free"

Everybody's had to fight to be free. ~Tom Petty

The American labor organizer, folk singer, storyteller and poet Utah Phillips once said, "The state can't give you free speech, and the state can't take it away. You're born with it, like your eyes, like your ears. Freedom is something you assume, then you wait for someone to try to take it away. The degree to which you resist is the degree to which you are free."

I've often thought that freedom might be the central concern in what we do as early childhood educators. It could also be the central concern in what we do as parents or, indeed, in any of our relationships with other living things. 

Evolution demands that we care for our babies for a decade or more, otherwise they are unlikely to survive, which in turn means our species would be unlikely to survive. In this way, we are very unlike other species, most of which can measure their requirement to care for their young in terms of months, weeks, or even days. 

Because our young need us for so long, it's easy to fall into the error of treating these relatively helpless humans as ours to control. We tell ourselves that it's for their own good, and perhaps it is, but for me it remains a concern because, ultimately, my hope for every child is that they not only assume their own freedom, but likewise know to resist those who would exert power over them. This is a real problem for those of us who value freedom considering that for many children, perhaps even most, they will have been under the control of adults for the first two decades of their lives.

In some cases, like with authoritarian style adults, this control is explicit, but even those of us who opt for more authoritative or permissive approaches, still, at the end of the day, find that we must, at least from time to time, "for their own good," excerpt control over the children in our lives. We do it in the name of safety, such as when we forbid them from playing in traffic. We do it in the name of justice, civil society, morality, and courtesy, such as when we don't allow them to hit other children. We exert this power over them, we tell ourselves, in service to our responsibility as important adults in their lives.

But the slope is a slippery one. Too many of us, when we step back and really focus on the central concern of freedom, find that at least some of what we do isn't for their own good, but rather our own. In my new course Controlled Chaos: Teacher Tom's Guide to Classroom Management, we explore what passes for "classroom management," and much of it falls into this category: the sitting and silence and walking in straight lines. As a preschool teacher, I felt it was incumbent upon me to know the difference between my actual responsibility to care for children, to keep them safe, to keep them clothed, fed, and sheltered, and the control I exerted for my own ends.

It's not easy knowing where this line is and it is likely different for every relationship we have with a young human. Finding the line is, for me, an ongoing dialog between myself and the children, both individually and collectively. One way I have of locating that line is when a child, or children, resist. Too often, our instinct is to double down when they fight to be free, to view it as a challenge to our authority. But if we are taking our responsibility seriously, if we are truly seeking to raise free humans, and I hope we are, it is incumbent upon us to listen to their resistance as important communication, and reconsider what we are doing and why we are doing it.

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In this brand new 6-week course, you will learn how to break the cycle of control, command, punishments, and rewards that have characterized the childhoods of so many of us. If you're ready to transform your classroom management skills so that you are truly supporting every child to get their needs met, and in turn transform challenging behaviors, then please consider joining the inaugural cohort for Controlled Chaos: Teacher Tom's Guide to Play-Based Classroom Management. To learn more and to register, click here.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

This is What Classroom Management Looks Like in a Play-Based Setting

The boy had shed his jacket onto the floor, leaving it in a heap right in the middle of the room. Under normal circumstances I would have said something like, "Your coat is on the floor; it belongs on a hook," then waited for him to think things through. But this was his first day and he was only two, so I instead picked it up with the intention of hanging it for him.

He rushed at me, screaming something that didn't sound like Nooooooo! but clearly meant it. He snatched his coat from my hands. "I do it!"

I said, "The hooks are over there." It took some doing, but he finally managed it. 

Later that morning, he was playing with a small wooden ball that escaped him and rolled under some shelves. I happened to be sitting right there so I automatically reached for the ball, but again he stopped me, "I do it!" And he did.

When he sat down for a snack, the adult who was there tried to help him wash his hands, but he refused. "I do it!" When she tried to serve him carrot sticks and grapes, he put them back on the serving platter one at a time, saying, yet again, "I do it!" This is what "classroom management" looks like in a play-based program. (If you're interested in learning more, see the link at the bottom of this post to my brand new course, Controlled Chaos: Teacher Tom's Guide to Classroom Management).

He was firm with us, if a bit fussy, as if he was accustomed to adults putting up a fight. His mother had laughed that he was a "willful" child, rolling her eyes as if to say "Good luck!" Of course, she wasn't talking about his willfulness manifesting as it had so far at school, a boy clearly wanting to do it for himself. She was talking about those times when it resulted in digging in his heels about things like baths or leaving the playground.

But it's the same instinct. As unpleasant and annoying as it might be for us adults, willfulness in a child tells us that they are willing to take responsibility for their own lives. It's the kind of thing that we aren't always good at recognizing in young children. Indeed, standard classroom management systems and parenting books are full of tips and advice on how to motivate children to do exactly that: take responsibility for themselves, for cleaning their rooms, for learning their lessons, for controlling their emotions. Sadly, we've become so addicted to the behaviorist ideas of rewards and punishments that even the best of us, like a bad habit, resort to them.

"If you get in the car, I'll give you a cookie." "If you don't get in the car, you won't get a cookie." 

The problem is that all the research done on these sorts of external motivators is that they simply don't work (see Alfie Kohn's Punished by Rewards). Oh sure, if the carrot is sweet enough or the stick painful enough, a child can be made to do almost anything, but if it is to work a second or third or fourth time, it will require increasingly sweet rewards and increasingly painful punishments. Not only that, but the entire process sucks any sense of joy or satisfaction right out of the activity itself until the only reason the child, or anyone, continues behaving in a certain way is to receive the reward or to avoid the punishment. 

This explains why so many older kids don't see a problem with cheating. If the goal is a good grade (external motivation), then copying a friend's homework makes sense, while if learning (intrinsic motivation) is the goal, then copying someone else's work is counterproductive. On the flip side, the consequence of getting caught cheating isn't a bad conscience (the natural consequence), but rather that the adults in your life will take away something about which you are intrinsically motivated, like recess or hanging out with your friends at the mall.

Study after study has shown that rewards and punishments have a negative effect on self-motivation. Even previously pleasurable things, things we do willingly, can be ruined by the introduction of rewards and punishments. 

Like with many things, our schools have it backwards. They tend to operate under the misguided theory that children need to first be extrinsically motivated, and only then, as time goes by will they develop intrinsic motivation. This is completely unsupported by any science. It is the same method Pavlov used to make his dogs salivate.

At the same time adults, both educators and parents, tend to set ourselves up as the arbiters of what a child should be doing or learning. Had I commanded that two-year-old boy, "Hang up your coat," I'm quite confident that he would have responded "willfully," perhaps reluctantly hanging up his coat because I was an authority figure, but more likely, knowing the boy, he would have refused altogether, whining, sulking, or shrieking.

So what are we to do? Well, first of all, we need to stop bossing kids around so much. Researchers have found that some 80 percent of the sentences adults say to children are commands and no one responds well to being told what to do, no matter what our age. 

Secondly, we can learn to trust a child's intrinsic motivations. This isn't an easy thing in standard schools because, obviously, each child is going to be motivated in different ways, about different things, and on different schedules, while teachers are expected to march all the kids through the same things on the same schedule. If we are going to do what the science tells us, however, we will create interesting and varied environments for children in which they have the freedom to manipulate, explore, discover, and invent, in the company of others or all alone, at their own pace.

We will drop grading and testing, those carrots and sticks that put so much focus deficits, and replace them with something like Learning Stories, in which educators observe the children, then write the story of what the child is doing and learning. These stories would be written to the children themselves, and their families, creating a record of the child's intrinsically motivated learning journey, a truly useful "permanent record" that is entirely focused on the strengths of each child. Because, as my friend and proponent of Learning Stories Wendy Lee told me, "What we focus on grows."

When would teachers have time to write these Learning Stories? Removing direct instruction, grading, lesson planning, and classroom management from an educator's responsibilities should leave plenty of time to focus on the actual learning.

None of this means a child will no longer be willful. Indeed, it frees all children to be powerfully, happily willful, which is to say, it frees them to take responsibility for their own lives, and that, in the end, is the purpose of all true education. 

"I do it!"

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In this brand new 6-week course, you will learn how to break the cycle of control, command, punishments, and rewards that have characterized the childhoods of so many of us. If you're ready to transform your classroom management skills so that you are truly supporting every child to get their needs met, and in turn transform challenging behaviors, then please consider joining the inaugural cohort for Controlled Chaos: Teacher Tom's Guide to Play-Based Classroom Management. To learn more and to register, click here.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

"The Entire Purpose of the Brain is to Make Efficient Movement from Experience"

Neuroscientist Patrick House asserts that "the entire purpose of the brain is to make efficient movement from experience."

Another prominent neuroscientist, Antonio Damasio claims that the thing we call consciousness (or mind) emerged from the so-called universal emotions like fear, anger, sadness, happiness, disgust, and surprise which are the triggers for action, or movement, related to survival.

"Movement is so fundamental to life that its absence defines death," writes psychotherapist and advanced student of Thich Nhat Hanh, Christine Caldwell.

Young children move -- a lot. They run when adults feel that walking should suffice. They squirm when adults expect stillness. They jump and shout and swing and balance and shake their heads and giggle even when we threaten them with punishment. Indeed, the term "classroom management" is all about preventing or at least controlling the movement of children. Yet if the scientists are correct, movement is the fundamental principle behind everything that makes us human. 

Plants are intelligent. We can tell by their behavior, which is to say their movement: they know to sprout, to turn toward the light, to find water and minerals with their roots, to release noxious chemicals when attacked by pests. The reason we tend to dismiss their intelligence as inferior to human intelligence, however, is that we believe, perhaps rightly so, that plants do not share our capacity to know that they are intelligent. That is the blessing and curse of being human. We possess minds that allow us to at least approach the question of why we are doing the things we do. Our minds, which evolved from our emotions, which in turn evolved from the necessity to move in order to survive, are capable of knowing that what we are doing is intelligent . . . Or stupid, stupid, stupid as the case may be.

In school, we likewise judge the intelligence of children by their actions. Specifically, we judge them by their ability to provide pre-approved answers to our questions or to demonstrate proficiency in some pre-approved activity like reading or ciphering or recalling the dates of this or that historical event. In preschool we might judge their intelligence by how they grip a crayon or help themselves to a glass of water without spilling. And all of this judgement is undertaken within the confines of what we have arbitrarily determined to be the proper behavior, action, movement in our artificially created environments. And we correct, criticize, and punish when a child's behavior, actions, or movements do not fit our definition of proper.

In my brand new 6-week course -- Controlled Chaos: Teacher Tom's Guide to Classroom Management -- we will be examining what school could be like if "classroom management" actually followed the science and accommodated our natural need to move.

At the end of the day, it's hard not to look at what we do to and with children in the name of education as adults attempting to manipulate and compel children to move or not move according to programs we've pre-set for them. If the scientists are correct, our minds have evolved as a way of determining how we should move or act according to experience. When a child has a tantrum or runs around the classroom or can't sit for circle time or hits a classmate, we are seeing evidence of their intelligence. And as intelligent adults perhaps our first instinct should not be to control their behavior, but rather to take their intelligence seriously. When we do, we ask ourselves: What is it about this place that causes this intelligent child to move in this way? And if we are to value that child's intelligence we will take action to change the environment or our expectations or our ideas about classroom management.

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In this brand new 6-week course, you will learn how to break the cycle of control, command, punishments, and rewards that have characterized the childhoods of so many of us. If you're ready to transform your classroom management skills so that you are truly supporting every child to get their needs met, and in turn transform challenging behaviors, then please consider joining the inaugural cohort for Controlled Chaos: Teacher Tom's Guide to Play-Based Classroom Management. To learn more and to register, click here.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

That's a Lot to Lose in the Name of Arbitrary Adult Control

Jean Piaget in his office

The conventional wisdom is that an uncluttered classroom is best for young learners. I regularly see photos labeled as "classroom don'ts" with scads of posters and other art on the walls, things dangling from the ceilings, and materials stuffed willy-nilly on shelves. These busy, messy spaces, we're told, are full of distractions, making it difficult to concentrate. They are visually over-stimulating, whereas a cleaner, tidier space, with it's bare walls and organized shelves, calms children, which is, according to this theory, the proper mindset for learning. Indeed, research indicates that a tidy space may promote such desirable traits as healthy eating and generosity. People in tidy spaces are, likewise, more likely to follow rules, adhere to expectations, and to make "conventional" choices, which would, I presume, make them better at, say, passing a test.

"If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?" ~Albert Einstein

Research also indicates that a messy space promotes creative thinking and stimulates new ideas. "Disorderly environments seem to inspire breaking free of tradition, which can produce fresh insights," according Kathleen Vohs, the University of Minnesota psychological researcher who studies these things. "Orderly environments, in contrast, encourage convention and playing it safe."

So I can understand why educators concerned with such things as "classroom management" and marching children through a curriculum would value a spit-spot classroom.

Steve Jobs' home office

I can also understand why educators might want the visual of a tidy space as a way to appeal to parents considering where to send their children to school: order is very appealing in the abstract.

But it seems that what we lose is creativity and independent thought. And, indeed, as we will be discussing in my brand new 6-week course -- Controlled Chaos: Teacher Tom's Guide to Classroom Management -- that's a lot to lose in the name of arbitrary adult control.

I'm certain that some people are reading this with arguments in their heads one way or another, because, naturally, we all have our personal preferences. My own home tends to be very tidy ( . . . as far as you know, because I tidy up for company!) I suppose I consider my natural state, as far as space goes, as right on the edge. What I do with the next hour will often determine whether it's neat as a pin or a pig pen. I've seen a kind of ebb and flow. It almost feels like I need to occasionally clear the canvas, so to speak, before I can launch into my "real work." And then for weeks, the laundry situation is a mess, my counters are bestrewn, and my table tops are home to disorderly stacks.

Albert Einstein's desk. Ralph Morse/Time

The notion of space is a fascinating thing to consider. For most of human existence, we spent the bulk of our waking ours in unconfined space, with the sky as our ceiling, but we've always also created interior spaces in which to secure ourselves. Today, most of us spend most of our lives indoors and this goes for children as well. Indoor space is fundamentally different than outdoor space: one is finite, the other infinite. We feel we can control our indoor spaces, whereas, beyond the confines of our gardens, the outdoors is a place where we have no choice but to give up control: the sun rises on the evil and on the good; the rains fall on the just and the unjust. There is a feeling of freedom that one can attain outdoors that is more elusive when we're confined. We breath easier, we set aside our urge to control. We can't organize the trees or tidy the clouds. Being outdoors allows us to more easily just let go, which, is the best mental state for creativity.

Interior order is a more attainable thing, or so we think. We seek to control as much as we seek to be free. Both urges live within us. When someone sets themselves free indoors the way one might outdoors, we often talk about it as "giving up," a phrase that can be uttered in joy or in despair, and I suppose messiness can mean either of those things. Our interior spaces are like that. They often reveal our mental state. And changing the nature of our interior spaces can, quite often, trigger changes in our mental state and vice versa.

Is this really a good learning environment?

But these considerations are about spaces we can control. Piaget made his own office messy. I clutter up my own home. Classrooms, however, are shared spaces, much in the way that Mother Nature is a shared space. We release control outdoors, at least in part, because it's simply too vast to consider controlling, there are too many variables, too many agendas, so we "let go" which is a nicer way of saying "give up." When I see a tidy classroom, I see a single hand of a control and it doesn't belong to the children. I worry because I see space designed for and by "management." Not only that, but I know that the children who spend their days in that space are not free to manipulate the environment toward their own ends.

My goal is always creative thinking and new ideas. That is what learning is in my book. And toward that end, I've always preferred classrooms that are creations of all of us, not just "management." This means, "letting go" and embracing the notion of "tidy enough." This is the natural state of a world in which children have agency. It is the environment of creative thinking and new ideas.

It's tempting to fall back on the common wisdom of "finding a balance," but I think that's bunk. Balance is too often just a version of "both sider-ism," a dull compromise that leaves everyone dissatisfied. No, I think of my classroom space more in terms of ebb and flow in which the canvas is periodically cleaned. 

Our spaces shape us and we shape them in a back and forth between our urge to control and our need to be free.

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In this brand new 6-week course, you will learn how to break the cycle of control, command, punishments, and rewards that have characterized the childhoods of so many of us. If you're ready to transform your classroom management skills so that you are truly supporting every child to get their needs met, and in turn transform challenging behaviors, then please consider joining the inaugural cohort for Controlled Chaos: Teacher Tom's Guide to Play-Based Classroom Management. To learn more and to register, click here.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

Classroom Management Based on Helping Children Get Their Needs Met

I met this four-year-old boy because he had been forced to leave his previous preschool. Apparently, he had taken to hitting, biting, kicking, and otherwise abusing the adults around him. From what I'd been told, and I didn't quite buy it, he got along well with other kids, it was just the adults. Whatever the case, I would know the truth soon enough. As he glared at me from under his bangs, I knew we were starting out from a place of distrust.

I said, "Good morning" to him without any extra enthusiasm, then let him go about his business. My original plan might have been to spend the morning getting him on my bandwagon, but that was out the window with his very clear signals to back off, so plan B was to observe him from afar. And sure enough, he began making friends right away. His father had told me that he was a "big fan" of Legos, so I'd dumped our entire collection of plastic bricks into the sensory table and that's where he spent most of his morning, talking constantly about the cool things he was making. He positioned his body as far away from the adult as possible without leaving the table entirely.

I've known kids who were suspicious of me before, who found my personality a little too big, my voice a little too loud, my presence a little too overwhelming. I get that, but I'd never met a kid who kept his distance from all adults, his own parents, of course, excluded. His father had told me that he felt the problem in his previous school was that the teacher "kept getting in power struggles" and his son "always wins power struggles."

The boy had a spectacular morning, frankly. He was charming and engaged, eventually moving away from the Lego table, making a little art, checking out the cabinets in the home center, playing a round of a board game. He even sought me out at one point to show me the Batmobile he had created from Lego. The family, in consultation with an occupational therapist who had found nothing "diagnosable" in her time with the boy, had come to Woodland Park in the spirit of getting a new start.

It wasn't until we hit clean up time that his glare returned. "I'm not going to clean up!" he shouted at me when I passed where he sat, sulkily against a wall. "Fair enough," I answered, "Maybe you want to read a book or something." This is my standard response to a child who opts out and wants me to know about it.

Later as we gathered for circle time, he said, "I'm not coming to circle time." Again, I answered, "Fair enough," adding, "Sometimes kids like to spend circle time in the loft where it's quiet. If you change your mind, you can always join us."

I was employing a technique borrowed from improve comics. Too often, important adults in the lives of children become so focused on controlling a child's behavior that we forget that our primary role is to help children get their needs met. When we find a way to tell a child "Yes, and . . ." we are letting them know that we are on their side, that we are not "opposition," but rather an ally. What we say after the word "and" is a suggestion for an alternative to conflict.

All too often, traditional "classroom management" advice involves adults drawing hard lines with rules, schedules, and other expectations, enforcing them with the threat of punishment. This, of course, puts them in direct opposition to all children, but especially strong-willed children, which invariably leads to the class power struggle this boy's father was talking about.

That first day, the boy simply glared at us from his stance of opting out, although he did take my suggestion to look at books as the rest of us tidied and took refuge in the loft during circle time. And he made those choices the following day and the day after that, as the rest of us went about the business of our community, tidying up, singing songs, and talking about important things. 

On his fourth day with us, however, our circle time conversation turned to superheroes. One of the kids asserted, "I like Batman because he can fly to the clouds." I'd noted that the boy had been listening to us from afar and this was something he clearly couldn't let stand. "No he can't!" We all turned as he came down from the loft to tell us, "Batman doesn't fly. He swings on a rope and drives a Batmobile."

As the other children took up further debate, he slowly made his way across the room, drawn in by the manifest importance of this conversation. He had chosen to join us, a choice he continued to make from that time forward.

He never lost his knee-jerk opposition to adults who would presume to tell him what to do. It would come out whenever we forgot that his healthy need to think for himself must first be met. Of course, all children have this need, but in this boy it was particularly pronounced. It's an instinct that might frustrate future teachers who don't know that "challenging behaviors" are almost always best addressed by examining ourselves and our environment. The key is transforming how we think, how we feel, and how we talk about children who exhibit challenging behavior. And more often than not, this starts with stepping back from our urge to command and control to take a long hard look at what needs are not being met.

This is often a difficult thing to do. Our culture tells us that it is in the job description of any adult who works with children to "control" them, to make them behave, to insist upon obedience, to walk them in single file lines, to make them do their fair share. This attitude is reinforced everywhere, and it stands at the center of nearly every conventional "classroom management" system out there. 

As classroom teachers we are often, first and foremost, judged for our "classroom management" skills, which is really just fancy jargon for compelling obedience. Parents are often judged by how appropriately their children behave and when they misbehave it's the parents who have "lost control." In other words, we, as a society, expect young children to instantly and without objection set aside their own needs, always, and upon command, in favor of the needs expressed by the adult, be it for quiet, stillness, tidying up, or whatever. No wonder some children, like this boy, rebel. Indeed, I worry most about the children who simply go along with whatever they are told to do.

In my brand new 6-week course -- Controlled Chaos: Teacher Tom's Guide to Classroom Management -- we will explore a whole range of techniques designed to let the air out of this cycle, and refocus our efforts on helping each child get their needs met, including the use of "Yes, and . . ."

When we see our role as helping children get their needs met, rather than controlling them, much of what we label as "challenging behavior" is transformed. By not engaging in power struggles with this boy, I discovered that he had a strong need for autonomy, to make his own decisions, a healthy, natural thing. When I offered, "Yes, and . . . ," I let him know that he was heard and, even more importantly, trusted.

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In this brand new 6-week course, you will learn how to break the cycle of control, command, punishments, and rewards that have characterized the childhoods of so many of us. If you're ready to transform your classroom management skills so that you are truly supporting every child to get their needs met, and in turn transform challenging behaviors, then please consider joining the inaugural cohort for Controlled Chaos: Teacher Tom's Guide to Play-Based Classroom Management. To learn more and to register, click here.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

Controlled Chaos: Teacher Tom's Guide to Classroom Management

I'm excited to announce that registration is open for my brand new 6-part course -- Controlled Chaos: Teacher Tom's Guide to Classroom Management.

The phrase "classroom management" has always bugged me. Most of the time, when people use it, they're talking about adults who have "managed" to make their preschool classroom into a quiet place populated with well-mannered, attentive, motivated children, who raise their hands, walk in lines, and obey the teacher. 

More often than not, when people use the term "classroom management," what they're really talking about is some sort of system of behavioral mangement involving rules, schedules, punishments, and rewards: classic behaviorism. The adult's role is that of a benevolent dictator. As an educator once put it to me, "I'm their best friend until they cross the line, then I come down like a house of bricks." 

As an approach to both behavior and learning, behaviorism is an archaic oversimplification of human cognitive processes. It centers the relationship between adults and children on adult power and external motivation (rewards and punishments), ignoring what we know about how the human brain learns. Not only that, but command, control, and manipulation, the core of behaviorism, is an incredibly disrespectful way to interact with our fellow humans, even if they are children. It teaches that obedience, not thinking, is their highest calling.

My play-based classrooms have never been like that. Indeed, visitors have often used the term "controlled chaos" to describe what's they see happening. 

Sure, it can get loud and even a bit rowdy, but are the kids engaged? All of the time. Are they motivated? All of the time. Are they learning? At full capacity.

. . . But are they well-behaved? Perfectly. They are behaving like preschoolers who are engaged, motivated, and learning. You see, disobedience isn't a problem if obedience isn't the goal. 

A well-managed classroom is one in which the children are free to follow their curiosity, in the company of others, while getting real-world practice in living in a world with other people. Instead of learning to obey, the children think for themselves, make their own agreements with one another, and learn how to get their own needs met while also creating the space for others to met their's. It's no place for rewards or punishments, but rather an opportunity to learn through the natural consequences of their behavior. A well-managed play-based classroom may well look chaotic from the perspective of behaviorism, but that's because the "control" is discovered through self-regulation (the gold standard for behavior) rather than external force.

This course is intended for play-based educators, directors, and owners who are committed to respecting and honoring children as they learn through experience rather than rules. This course is especially for preschool and kindergarten teachers who find themselves overwhelmed by behavior management. And even if you're not a purely play-based practitioner (yet), I promise that once you've taken this course, you'll never go back to your old behaviorism system of classroom management.

I've based this course on nearly three decades of experience, my pedagogical philosophy, best practices, and on-the-ground practical methods, tips, and ideas. You will learn how to "manage" your classroom in a way that maximizes children's freedom, learning, and fun, without slipping into actual chaos (at least most of the time!). Not only will the children be empowered to develop intellectually, emotionally, and socially, but as an educator you will spend far les time dealing with so-called "challenging behaviors" and a lot more time focused on supporting what maters most: learning.

True play-based learning involves treating young children as fully formed humans with the attendant rights, responsibilities, and freedoms, and that's the kind of classroom management children need and deserve.

If this sounds interesting, check it out by clicking here. I'd love to see you in the first cohort for this course.

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Click the link to register and learn more about my new 6-week course -- Controlled Chaos: Teacher Tom's Guide to Play-Based Classroom Management. 

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!