Dartmouth Events

“Social and emotional development goes hand in hand with academics,” said Riley O’Connor, teacher and co-founder of the Willow School in Wilder, Vt., a private elementary school that ceased operations when its founders retired. “Some people say, "I see it as giving children the skills they need to manage themselves.”

Recess chat is a classroom activity where students participate in the process of talking about any behavior they encounter on the playground that doesn’t feel fair, or nice. “Students first tell the person who hurt their feelings, then they tell a teacher, and if they still feel the issue isn’t resolved, they bring it up at recess chat,” O’Connor explained. It started one day in 1996 when O’Connor found that a science project was being sabotaged by a problem that occurred at recess a few minutes earlier. She stopped the lesson and had a classroom meeting to discuss the problem on the playground.

“That thing where the teacher takes the student out into the hallway to talk about their bad behavior we flipped on its head,” says Willow School’s other founder, Terri Ashley. “When they’re embarrassed by their behavior, that’s when they change. Being told what you did wrong in the quiet hallway is very different from hearing the collective gasp of your classmates when they hear it and ask, ‘How could you do that?’ The parent of a Willow School student said, “They’re really ahead of the curve in terms of preventing bullying. The whole group works with the child to change the behavior. The child’s peers are asking, ‘Why would you do that? “lt’s much more powerful than if it was just coming from a teacher.” She also pointed out that every child in the school learned to be comfortable confronting the person who made them feel badly.

We may worry more  about bullying at the high school level, when pimples, income levels and social systems can cause rifts between people who used to be friends and know just what buttons to press to cause devastating reactions. But the seeds for bullying behavior are planted in the elementary years. This is when children learn how to act, how to respond, how to talk, and how to value themselves. If all elementary schools had daily meetings to discuss behaviors and feelings, we might see fewer victims, perpetrators and bystanders in the later grades. “You can’t fix everything,” says O’Connor. “But some things, you can fix.”

(from April/May 2012 Upper Valley Kid Stuff, Laura Jean Whitcomb publisher)