This post is possibly going to come across as a little blunt, for that, I offer no apology. By now, we should know better and we should be doing better!
Like many of you, I rejoiced when we got rid of national standards, but every day it becomes more obvious that this government is leading us back there, this time under the guise of science.
Don't get me wrong, if you are a follower of my blog, you will know that I support an explicit and systematic approach to the teaching of literacy and numeracy. However, my support comes with a warning label. This warning label clearly states that we should not blindly follow one way of working or one 'science' while ignoring what we know (or should know by now) about children.
So what is it our children need most? What our children need most right now is safety. In fact, I would go out on a limb here and say that without safety, anything else you do is a waste of time. If we want learning to be an outcome of what we are doing, we need to be talking to the cortex. This is absolutely impossible if a child does not feel safe. In fact, if they don't feel safe, all their brain will be focused on is identifying the danger and protecting themselves from it.
We create safe spaces by being developmentally responsive, trauma-aware, and neurodiversity-affirming, and by understanding the importance of working relationally. Ultimately, appreciating that all children are different and their pathway to safety may be completely different from another child's pathway.
We don't create safety by plonking a five, six, or seven-year-old, for that matter, on the mat and expecting them to learn in a structured way in the name of 'equitable' access to learning while completely ignoring them developmentally. This one-size-fits-all approach has me really worried. I hear and read daily about teachers struggling with the behaviour of their class, with little understanding of why this 'behaviour' is happening in the first place. Children being labelled as 'naughty' and learning support alarms being sounded simply because a child needs to move, and sitting on the mat for longer than fifteen minutes is more than their little body can handle. A child who is desperately trying to regulate, using strategies that involve movement or noise, will quickly be labelled disruptive in these environments.
This is not what safety looks like. I actually cannot fathom how we still have classes of junior children learning in 'sit-down, shut-up' environments with all we know now. People are so quick to complain about the extreme needs we see coming into our schools but not so quick to want to understand it.
What I love about striving to be developmentally responsive, trauma-aware, and neurodiversity-affirming (I say striving because we are always striving to be better, to do better, to be more consistent) is that these things are relational. They are also tightly woven in with play and taking an individual lens to each child. Play is a language, a language that helps us understand children if we take the time to learn it.
For a child to feel safe, they need to be in an environment that prioritises what they need. What they need is child-led play (for some, this will look more structured than others, and that is okay), rhythm and repetition, trusting relationships, and time. What they don't need is a day focused on getting to do what we 'need' them to do and how we 'need' them to do it every minute. What they don't need is to be labelled as naughty and disengaged.
The beauty is, we can have all this, and we can teach in an explicit and structured way. We can weave bite-sized learning throughout the day, teaching in a way that the brain can actually learn, focusing on the essentials and eliminating cognitive overload by appreciating that short bursts of learning are powerful.
What I have noticed through reading, particularly in Nathaniel Swain's book Harnessing the Science of Learning, is that schools gaining the most traction with the Science of Learning are schools that have also developed their understandings around trauma, development, and neurodiversity. This is not just a coincidence; this is because, if we don't prioritise safety, anything else we do will be a waste of time.
Play has been my biggest teacher. I started my journey into play many years ago now, and it has been the spark for everything else. Play taught me to notice, recognise, and respond. Play led me to relational approaches, a desire to better understand children, to understand the role of trauma and the stress response. It led me to explicit and systematic teaching, but rather than replace play, these things were simply enhanced by it. I see play as the greatest gift I was given as a teacher and as the greatest gift I can give to the children that come through my class and my school. Play is the ultimate vehicle for safety.
My cat might like to hide in boxes, but putting children in those boxes is just plain wrong.
I really recommend this podcast in fact the whole series is fantastic!
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