Creating Safety and Trust

What do teachers and students need and want? Students we talked to often told us that teachers don't listen to them and that all that teachers want is for students to be quiet and to turn in their homework on time. In short, what students say they want most is for teachers and other adults to listen to them, respect their ideas, and consider their needs.

Kids learn in communion. They listen to people who matter to them and to whom they matter.

Nel Noddings

Teachers want students to take more responsibility for their behavior and learning. They want to have more time to give attention to individual learning needs and to see more engaged learning taking place in their classrooms. They want school policies that are more respectful of students and that would encourage more respectful interactions between students. For themselves, they would like to have more respectful interactions with administrators and other policy makers.

To meet the needs of both students and teachers we suggest placing relationships at the center of classroom concern. In a "relationship based" classroom, safety, trust, student needs, teacher needs, and modes of communication are considerations as important as history, language arts, science, or other academic subjects. Teachers may think that these new considerations require more work for them. However, we hope to show that time spent creating safety and trust, meeting individual needs, and improving communication skills actually creates what educators want most — a compassionate learning community where engaged learning flourishes.

The Case for Safety First

Alfie Kohn points out in his book No Contest that if we want learning to take place, students need the emotional safety provided by "an environment built upon support, nurturing, consideration, mutual contribution, a sense of belonging, protection, acceptance, encouragement, and understanding" — in other words, a relationship based classroom where needs of students and teachers are respected. In such a classroom there is safety and trust. And where there is safety and trust, there are the seeds for compassion and engaged learning.

Fear in whatever form prevents the understanding of ourselves and of our relationship to all things.

J. Krishnamurti

When teachers consciously create caring relationships and teach relationship skills, they build a strong foundation of safety and trust. Studies show that this increased safety and trust result in more cooperation, less conflict, and fewer verbal put downs in the classroom. Students are more sensitive to the needs of others, and empathy increases between teachers and students as well as between students. In addition, better scores on standardized achievement tests and improved ability to acquire skills have been reported.

Results of a year long study of the effects of teaching NVC to elementary school age children showed improved relationships between students and teacher, reduction of conflicts, increased confidence in communication skills, and, in general, more harmony and cooperation in the school community.

In spite of the evidence showing the importance of safe, trusting relationships, we know that many students and teachers do not feel safe at school. From pressure and stress in classrooms to playground conflicts, there is much about school life that contributes to anxiety and fear. Physical violence on school campuses is the most obvious sign that there is a lack of safety for students. The fear that these incidents engender has profound effects for students and their families.

Many parents we have spoken to are afraid to send their children to schools and are choosing to homeschool them. A guidance counselor in a Southern California junior high school told us that, for the first time in her twenty-five-year career, she is working with students who are so

fearful about their physical safety at school that they refuse to attend. This phenomenon is taking place in schools throughout the United States. The National Education Association reports that 160,000 students stay home from school every day due to fear of attack or intimidation.

While acts of physical violence cause general alarm and concern for the safety of our children, there are less dramatic daily occurrences at school that induce fear in students by undermining their emotional safety. As a result of the compulsory nature of one-size-fits-all curricula, methods, and school policies, many fourth, fifth, and sixth grade students realize that school is not a place where they will be able to get their needs for understanding, contributing, and learning met. Out of their sense of hopelessness and frustration, some lash out with name calling, verbal put downs, taunting, or other aggressive behaviors. These are counter-productive strategies for meeting fundamental needs. However, bullying in one form or another is a common occurrence in most schools. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that approximately 75 percent of students say they have been bullied at school.

Bullying creates a climate of fear and dread that threatens the physical and emotional safety of all students. It is very difficult to stay focused on studies when you are trying to recover from the altercation you just had or when you are anticipating the next one.

As James Garbarino and Ellen deLara have shown, "Many schools inadvertently support and enable hostile and emotionally violent environments." Although teachers feel discouraged by the daily round of bullying, put downs, taunting, teasing, blaming and cliquish behavior, and recognize the cost to themselves and students, they don't know what to do about it. And all too often they don't even know that they are contributing to it.

Marshall Rosenberg tells the story of a school principal he visited who was looking out at the school playground from his office window. The principal saw a big boy hit a smaller boy. He ran from his office, swatted the bigger boy, and gave him a lecture. When he got back to his office, the principal said, "I taught that fellow not to hit people who are smaller than he is." Dr. Rosenberg said: "I'm not so sure that's what you did. I think that you taught him not to do it while you're looking." The principal did not see that he was modeling the very behavior that he was trying to stop.

Other ways that teachers, often unknowingly, stimulate...