Creating Emotionally Safe Schools: A Guide for Educators and Parents - Softcover

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Jane Bluestein, Ph.D., is a dynamic and entertaining speaker who has worked with thousands of educators, counselors, health-care professionals, parents and child-care workers. She specializes in programs and resources that provide training and hope for relationship building, effective instruction and guidance, and personal development. A former classroom teacher, crisis-intervention counselor and teacher training program coordinator, Bluestein is the award-winning author of 21st Century Discipline; Being a Successful Teacher; Parents, Teens & Boundaries and Mentors, Masters and Mrs. MacGregor: Stories of Teachers Making a Difference. She heads Instructional Support Services, Inc., a consulting and resource firm in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Visit Jane Bluestien online at www.janebluestein.com

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Part I - Dimensions of a Very Big Picture

Teaching is the greatest act of optimism.
Colleen Wilcox

The starting point for a better world is the belief that it is possible.
Norman Cousins

Before the beginning of great brilliance, there must be Chaos.
I Ching

There's this commercial that begins by showing us a couple standing on top of a medieval castle. As the camera pulls back, we see that the castle is actually a chess piece on a board between two people riding on a train. The camera pulls back again and we see the train through the window of a house—as part of a model railroad in a family's playroom. Each time we step back, we realize that each world-within-a-world, complete as each seemed to be, is simply a part of a much larger reality. The continual change in perspective is both breathtaking and brilliant, an important reminder about how an image or event can, in fact, simply be one small facet of a far bigger reality.

So it goes with safety in schools. Invariably, whenever somebody brings up the topic, the conversation seems to focus on one little piece of this reality—usually a headline-grabbing instance of violence or vandalism. However, if we apply the "big picture" perspective to this issue, we realize that the more extreme breaches of school safety are only a very small part of a much larger issue. Unfortunately, despite our efforts to place these events in a larger context, we can easily become fixated on the intensity of a terrible moment, and lose our sense of the multidimensional reality in which the events occurred. When our focus narrows to one little corner of the picture, we can neglect the millions of other details that are also a part of the scenery, much less how all these threads are woven together or how they impact one another. When our vision fails to go beyond the immediacy of the moment, our lack of perspective can have serious consequences, particularly with regard to how we respond to the event and the solutions we propose.

Certainly safety is an issue whenever violence occurs. But it's also an issue for the student who is terrified of being called on to give an oral presentation to the class, the kid anticipating being harassed or attacked on the playground, or the child who knows that the end of the school day leads back to an unstable or violent home. It's an issue for kids who don't test well, for kids who learn best by touching and moving, and for kids whose strengths lie in areas the schools neither assess nor value. It's an issue for the child nobody notices, the child nobody will play with, the child who camouflages inadequacy with a string of achievements. It's an issue for nonlinear thinkers and for students who look "different." It's an issue for parents, particularly when their kids are having—or causing—problems. And it's an issue for teachers who are faced with increasing demands and inadequate resources, who are held accountable for many things over which they have very little control, and whose work often fails to generate the respect and compensation it deserves.

For the most part, we haven't placed a very high premium on providing emotionally safe learning environments for kids or adults. Even when we acknowledge its importance, safety can easily become a casualty to traditions that make assessment more important than learning, or those that value subject matter over students. We sacrifice safety when we fail to notice a child in distress or ignore the hurtful behavior of one student to another, when we use tests or grades to punish, when we ignore academic needs in favor of curricular mandates. Emotional safety is undermined by sarcasm, impatience and contempt, by "gotcha" discipline policies, by pop quizzes, by teachers who yell or humiliate.

In fact, emotional safety is an issue in so many situations in school that any improvement effort worth its salt—as narrowly focused as that effort may need to be—will necessarily take the "whole" into account. Yet how often are policies implemented or programs adopted before their potential impact on the emotional climate of the school is taken into account? It's one thing to expect our schools to produce every type of outcome under the sun—from higher academic performance to good citizenship—and quite another to create the type of environment in which these reasonable expectations can actually unfold. In the absence of a safe learning environment, a great deal of energy is expended in an effort to create safety, self-protecting by any means necessary, and not always in the most constructive ways. Learning is undermined and teaching is far more difficult than it needs to be. So we deal with the symptoms and react to the events, but until we quit dancing around the core issues and the dynamics that keep feeding the beast, we will continue to be disappointed when quick-fix surface solutions fail, one after the other—or make the problems even worse.

So here's the deal: Let's look at the big picture and some of the factors that play into making a school climate what it is. And let's look at some of the ways that kids and adults need to feel safe before we zero in on one little corner of the room and imagine that if it's clean, the rest of the house will be just fine. Yes, it's big, but it's doable. Maybe all we need to do is step back and take in the immensity and complexity of it all, for therein lie potential and magnificence. And in the end, what could be more worthwhile?

Chapter 1 - What Safety Is

I have this recurring nightmare: I'm back in high school and I can't get out.
Ruthie

I was a slow reader and a slow answerer. My learning style didn't "work." I was terrified. I never understood anything right.
Sheryl

Of course I'm right-handed. I went through three years of school with my left hand tied to my desk.
Martin

Forty-five years later, there are two words that still strike an icy fear in my heart: Gym Class.
Ron

I was never afraid of my teachers, unless I didn't know something. Or forgot my book. Or came late. Or made a mistake.
Hallie

Excerpts from various survey and interview responses to questions about emotional safety in respondents' school experiences

It's 1999, right before Thanksgiving, and I'm sitting down to breakfast with the Sunday paper. I reach for the comics and the color supplements, which is where I normally start, but I can't get past the headlines: Deming Girl Dies. A thirteen year-old middle-school student in southern New Mexico is now dead at the hands of a classmate, shot in the back of the head in the lobby of the school. On page two, a story about a boy the same age in Palmdale, California, dead after a fistfight in which he hit his head on the sidewalk. On the following page are details of the Texas A&M University bonfire tragedy, which killed twelve and injured twenty-seven. I haven't even been at the table ten minutes, and I've gotten a very strong message over and over in the first three pages of our local newspaper: Our schools are not safe.

We read and hear much about death and violence in schools, even though fewer that 1 percent of all violent deaths of children occur on school grounds.2 In fact, assuming we can trust the numbers, schools are safer for children than their homes or communities. And yet, what gets the greatest attention and the widest coverage? Even the U.S. Department of Education's Annual Report on School Safety, which affirms that "the vast majority of America's schools are safe places," focuses much of its reporting on crime, substance abuse and violence. These statistics, and the stories we...