Four ways writing can help with school safety
When we hear the word “safety”, it’s usually physical safety that first comes to mind. I want to address that kind of safety, and also include emotional safety, where kids feel their classroom is a place where they are valued and cared about. When students don’t feel safe in one or both of these ways it is hard for them to focus on learning.
And let’s not kid ourselves by thinking that emotional safety isn’t that big a deal. Many people who hurt others start by feeling like outcasts early in life.
Here are four ways that writing can help, either by alerting a teacher to an unsafe physical threat, or promoting an atmosphere of emotional safety.
Have a way for students to communicate to you in writing if they have a problem.
Some students are shy or feel they cannot come up to you in person. Have a place in the classroom specifically for notes to you from students and actively encourage the use of it.
Tell students frequently that you want to hear from them if they feel unsafe in any way, including the ways others speak to them or treat them. I found that when I actually encouraged kids to “tell”, suddenly stories would come up that they hadn’t thought were important.
2. Send a positive note home.
Write a positive note, specifically to parents of kids who typically get the most negative attention. This will make all of your future communications with the family (even when it’s not great news) go down easier.
Why a note rather than a phone call? A written note can be easily shared with other family members and with the child, too. A phone call has to be distilled and repeated. Notes can also be kept.
AND this will make the child feel safer at school and learn more, knowing they are not seen as just a “bad” kid.
3. Have students write positive notes to classmates.
This can be prefaced with the book How Full is Your Bucket or a similar story that illustrates the importance of what we say to each other. When I taught first and second grades we had blue paper “raindrops” and a paper bucket for each student.
For several weeks after reading the book, there were numerous opportunities to write notes (all made fair with equal numbers of classmates’ names on the drops that kids could choose to write on). Then all the buckets came down from the wall and everyone was so excited to read their notes and take them home! Including me.
Again, notes are special because they can be saved. Here’s my favorite one, written 4 years ago but it still makes me smile!
4. Use an extra few minutes here and there to allow students to write you a quick note.
There’s always a lot going on in everyone’s life, and we don’t catch it all. If you have a few minutes of down time or waiting time, have your kids write a quick note to you about anything they want you to know. (Or they can draw a quick picture if there’s nothing to tell).
When I taught second grade I had kids do this on the back of the page for 2 minutes when the weekly spelling test was done. Once in awhile I would learn something important that I didn’t know that was happening in a student’s life.
Even if there’s not usually significant information from this, the message to kids is that you care about them, and that in itself creates more safety in your room.
As teachers, we never know when a small thing can have an impact.
So why not do all the small things we can to make a classroom and a world a bit safer?
After all, the kid who wrote “your smart wen your silly too” has no idea that I still have his little message in my heart. Maybe he still has mine.