Overturning the Rules
and Creating Amiable Classrooms

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(cont.) - Page 5

  Bobbie-Jo provided an example of the process of questioning that could lead to rule reduction. One day a child brought in a new action figure and told Bobbie-Jo about it. A teacher interrupted, saying: “That needs to go in his cubby.”

“Wait a minute. Why?”
“Because it’s not his show-and-tell day.”
“Let’s put this in adult perspective. Suppose on the weekend you got engaged. You come in with your engagement ring and want to show everybody, and I say to you, ‘Whoa, whoa, it’s not your day. But you can put that in your locker.’ It’s the same thing.”

  “OK, he can keep it in here [the class], as long as he shares it with everybody.”
  “I can go along with that as long as I can have a turn with your jewelry when you’re done.”

  Bobbie-Jo argued that there are many toys to share in centers but “not everything is for sharing.” “If it’s not OK for me to borrow another adult’s jewelry, watch, or sweater, I don’t think it’s OK for us to expect children to share their things.”

  Teachers worried that welcoming play materials from home would not work, and they called Bobbie-Jo to come and see how upset children were the first few times such toys were brought into class. Gradually, it became easier to permit items from home to be part of classroom life. Melita said, “It really reduced stress. You are not in power struggles with children.” Brenda added that “parents really appreciate it too,” not having to struggle over telling a child to leave a precious item behind. Children’s self-investment in their belongings shows an attachment to their identity, and separating from something that contributes to identity is emotionally difficult.

  Two months after the initial workshop, Bobbie-Jo, the first to stimulate a reexamination of rules in her center, presented the experience at a local teacher network meeting. After handing out a revised list of new and reduced rules, Bobbie-Jo said, “They thought it was completely crazy. They said, ‘I would like to see you come and do that at our center!’” Removing rules seemed counterintuitive.

  Laurie said of her center, “We started to abandon the rules and then understood their impact on both children and teachers. We were dealing with ‘behavior’ on a regular basis. We asked ourselves, ‘Why are we doing this? Why are only four children allowed in water play? How is that promoting children’s development?’”

  The teachers began allowing as many children as wished to to come to the water play area and found that the focus of the teachers became one of negotiating and developing children’s social skills for entering play. The teachers made the water table more accessible, pulling it away from the wall so children could crowd all around it. The playdough table too went from having three places to many places. The staff focus became “giving children the skills to learn to enter the situation,” such as problem-solving how to find another place to play.

  Overall, the teachers in all three centers found that eliminating rules reduced stress. In addition, Callaghan was struck by the process of negotiating rules when incidents arose, with teachers asking each other, “What do you think about this?” Children were invited to join the discussions when teachers asked, “Do we need a rule about this?” Of interest is the fact that the changes and their consequences were consistent across the three centers and that the changes appeared quickly, over months, not years.

 

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