Care Balances Structure

Hey 👋

We’re so nearly there. This is your last snack before the hols…

Big idea 🍉

Structure fosters safety. Strong expectations, routines, norms, and accountability can create classrooms where students feel confident to share their thinking (and all the benefits this brings).

However, structure alone is not enough. When we create social structures like these in school, there’s a risk that some students can perceive them as a tool for wielding control rather than a framework for enabling growth, and as a result: ignore or even undermine them.

For school to work, it’s essential that we help students to understand and sense the care that sits beneath the structure. Care is the reagent that transforms constraint into support.

Now, care is not just a sentiment: it’s something we must show through action, through regular and visible demonstrations, such as when we:

• Push and believe: Hold students to high standards, remind them that ‘if I let you off, I let you down’, and show unwavering confidence in their capacity.

• Celebrate and connect: Regularly use names, smile, listen, and celebrate successes to build a sense of ‘I’ve got your back’ and ‘we’re in this together’.

• Explain the why: Help students see the benefits (for them) behind our routines and expectations.

Over time, with sufficient demonstrations of care, students will stop seeing structure as something done to them and start seeing it as something done for them. Care balances structure (a bit like warm balances strict).

NOTE: Demonstrations of care must be credible and consistent. Students can smell insincerity a mile away, and when we lose trust, it can take a LONG time to re-build. Trust it’s the hardest-earned of social currencies.

🎓 For more, check out this study on the interplay between trust, behaviour, and learning.

Summary

• By itself, structure may be interpreted as controlling and constraining.

• It’s only when we balance it with visible demonstrations of care that structure becomes understood as supportive.

• We can do this by regularly explaining the why, holding high expectations, and celebrating student success.

Little updates 🥕

• Review of how neuroscience is supporting education → argues it can help us better understand learning, but only if explained clearly and built into training.

• Study comparing solo vs partner flashcard use → finds both methods lead to similar learning, but using flashcards with a partner helps students judge their own learning more accurately, which can support metacognition.

• Survey of young people’s hopes and struggles → suggest they are ambitious and hardworking but held back by loneliness, feeling unsafe, and untrusting of those in power 😢

• New this morning → Cracking research-based guide to understanding and boosting student motivation and engagement

Get school to treat you to a smarter future → Learn about Snacks PRO