Building Respectful Schools and Individuals

Kyle gets angry at his classmate and blurts out a disrespectful word. Does Kyle's teacher need to teach him some self-control skills? Or does she need to consider the school's general culture of disrespect, which may be fostering Kyle's disrespectful reactions?

My article, "Respect: Where Do We Start?," (in the September 2011 Educational Leadership on the theme "Promoting Respectful Schools") discusses relationship issues that insidiously contribute to a school culture of disrespect. Educators' interactions with one another not only create relationship templates for students, but they also color the way in which educators handle students' mistakes.

For example, are lunch conversations in your school typically problem-saturated and dominated by the latest misbehavior of a student? Do cliques and gossip undermine the staff's morale? How do these issues affect your likelihood of being professional, patient, and resourceful with your students? 

Gently raising educators' awareness of the unintended effects of these habits and increasing experiences of appreciation can contribute greatly to each person making more constructive decisions and creating a respectful relational context. 

In addition to building a school culture that is cohesively structured by respectful and appreciative interactions, we can also help individual students through positive skill-boosting conversations. (Examples of such conversations can be found at www.skillionaire.org.) Neuroscience tells us that evoking positive emotions is a better way to engage people in constructive change than emphasizing the negative.

So with Kyle, instead of just dwelling on the one "bad word" he said, his teacher might talk with him about what strategies he used to restrain himself before saying the second or third "bad word." This approach would build on the self-control wiring that already exists in Kyle's brain and increase his awareness of his own effective self-control strategies.

How do you as an educator increase your students’ and colleagues awareness of habits and skills that build respect?

 

Post submitted by Marie-Nathalie Beaudoin, author of The Skill-ionaire in Every Child: Boosting Children’s Socio-Emotional Skills Using the Latest in Brain Research (Goshawk Publications, 2010).