On creating communities that meet kid needs (and adults' too!) with educator Rachel McEvoy
On creating communities that meet kid needs (and adults' too!) with educator Rachel McEvoy
Too many rules? Not enough? Educators often try both before finding their Middle Way.
When thinking about a community that has both structure and space, we need to ask, “How can we create a community that takes everybody's needs into consideration – those who need more structure, and those who need less?” We also want kids to be thinking, “Even if I don’t need the same support … how can I still show patience and understanding for those who do?” – Rachel McEvoy
Right on time, my son began complaining last week that his new kindergarten class had “too many rules.” In my last post, I wrote about how the process of coming together in community, and then becoming very cranky about the concessions that community requires of one, is a normal developmental process in group formation. Eventually, if the rules are fair, I trust that he’ll settle in and come to appreciate these structures for what they are: a way to ensure all needs can be met.
People often ask me how teachers learn to do this — to meet the needs of today’s increasingly diverse groups of children. I certainly wasn’t born knowing how. Early in my career, when I felt less secure in the front of a classroom, I made the mistake of coming in hot with what many of my students felt were “too many rules.” As I wrote last week, seeking more control than you need means you then require aggression to maintain it — and I didn’t like the authoritarian, my-way-or-the-highway version of me assigned to the task (even if other adults did).
After that, I enrolled at Bank Street, a graduate school known for incubating educators of the Progressive, “guide by the side” variety — as opposed to the more traditional, lecture-based “sage on the sage” model. (If you’ve encountered any school environment that bills itself as Montessori, Reggio, play-based, project-based or student-centered, you’re likely to see the influence of Bank Street, either in the curriculum, the teaching staff or both.) My quest to become such a guide led me, at first, to over-correct for my prior strictness, dropping not just unnecessary rules but necessary expectations for students — what they’ll learn, how they’ll treat each other. That overly permissive approach didn’t work out well either.
After over ten years and hundreds of students taught, I’m quite comfortable with my ability to balance space and structure. I’ve become what Lisa Delpit calls a “warm demander.” (Now that I’m a parent, I also get equal amounts of unsolicited feedback from judgy adults alleging that I’m either too permissive or too strict, which further confirms I’ve likely landed on a happy medium.)
That said, being an authoritative parent or teacher still requires moment to moment mindfulness and inquiry. Am I giving too much structure now? How about now? It’s not something I do once a year, but many times a day.
To help me explore how people in tending work can find their own inner balance between authoritarian and permissive approaches to building kid-centered communities — and by so doing, reduce inner and outer conflict in their roles — I invited one of my favorite fellow Bank Street grads, the brilliant educator Rachel McEvoy, to talk about finding what the Buddha might call her Middle Way.
Below, we talk about what it means to approach the process of community-building with both humility and quiet confidence, meeting kid needs while claiming our power as adults to shape the spaces we’re in — not just for them, but for the sake of our own thriving as well.
May the conversation that follows be of benefit to anyone who’s trying to figure this out, for the first or the fiftieth time this year.
Rachel, where'd you grow up?
Corvallis, Oregon.
What else grows there?
A lot of things my mom planted. When I talked to her the other day, the grapes were just starting to ripen, which always breaks my heart. Being a teacher, I can't be there for the late August grape harvest. There are many creatures that my mom tends to, like chickens, the local bird population and a small dog. It used to be bees, and then a whole native plant nursery. A whole oasis, really, that she has cultivated next to our house.
What was it like for you to grow there, in that oasis?
When I think about home, I think so much about the physical space. It was really sweet to be able to play in the cornstalks, or sit in the garden and eat until I had a tummy ache. And also to have a feeling of spaciousness that I could run free – beyond my parents' ears.
That's really a gift. And not one that necessarily all kids get these days. Certainly not our city-dwelling students.
No. A lot more supervision required, for good reason – but still.
What's your earliest memory of you tending another being?
In pre-K, we hatched eggs as a class, and they needed someone to take them home, so my mom said yes – which was like, the dream. They lived in our kitchen for the first weeks of their lives underneath a heat lamp and made the tiniest, softest peeps.
What are some things that you've really loved tending since?
My mom built a shed when I was maybe eight or nine and allowed me to have half of it. I remember the feeling of tending the space and filling it with colors and textures that brought me joy. Corduroy curtains, moon-shaped pottery from a friend.
Many years later, I did AmeriCorps, which was a different kind of tending.
What led you to do that, and what was that like?
I had this clear sense of a path for a while: law school. Then I studied for the LSATs, and in that experience, spent a lot of time around other people striving to do that, and they just didn't feel like my people. So I decided to see if there was something else that moved me or felt right.
I was very open to what that could be. I applied to work on everything from a job training program inside a prison in Arizona to a farm in downtown Albuquerque. I remember showing up to the farm interview in pearl earrings and a black sweater, and the farmer being like: “...And this is what you wanna do? Manual labor?”
I had found an interest in health policy through a course I took in college at NYU, though, so ultimately I chose a gig with a Family Resource Center in a small town in rural Northern California. They did everything the local health clinic or the school didn't. Health programming plus redwoods plus coast? I really felt like I'd won something. So I helped with things like after school cooking classes and raising money to build a greenhouse at the high school. In the greenhouse, the science class would grow vegetables to sell at the farmer’s market, and that money would go back to help fund the program.
It was definitely humbling, coming in from New York City, thinking, “I'm gonna swoop in here, I've got these great ideas,” and then realizing I didn't know anything about my new community, and where it intersected with me. Also, here I was talking to kids about healthy food at a time when I was very unhappy in my own body and had a very complicated relationship with food. Part of me was like, “I may have highly disordered eating, but… I can teach others how to eat ‘healthy.’” I was in the midst of learning how to tend my body after a lifetime of a lot of confusing messaging.
So I also learned a lot about what it meant to tend community that year, and to take a step back as an outsider – or many steps back – and just sit and listen and learn, and then reflect on where I could fit in and help.
It was also working with kids that made me love that kind of tending. The second year, I lived with a family, and there was a 5-year-old girl there. She was a very curious kid, very independent, with a big imagination. I just liked being around her. I noticed that her parents asked her a lot of questions when she would ask a question, in a non-annoying way. There was a lot of guided discovery happening. I liked thinking about all the ways that her environment helped make her who she was and is. I wanted to continue to surround myself with that energy, and think about how I could be a kind of person who could cultivate or empower the kind of curiosity that I saw her have about the world.
It was definitely humbling, coming in from New York City, thinking, “I'm gonna swoop in here, I've got these great ideas,” and then realizing I didn't know anything about my new community, and where it intersected with me… So I also learned a lot about what it meant to tend community that year, and to take a step back as an outsider – or many steps back – and just sit and listen and learn, and then reflect on where I could fit in and help. — Rachel McEvoy
What came next?
I decided to move back to New York because my core group of friends was there and there are a wide range of schools. I got a teaching job at a charter school in Brooklyn—one of the “zero tolerance” variety. It was a super hard year. The pedagogy, and the way that Black and brown students specifically were treated there, was really painful to be a part of. Seeing that felt wrong, even if teaching still felt right.
Thankfully I met somebody there who had started classes at Bank Street, which offered a different way of teaching and engaging with children that deeply, deeply resonated with me, and felt like a big breath of fresh air. So then after that year, I started at Bank Street as well.
How would you contrast the two – the “no tolerance” school, and particularly their approach to Black and brown children, and what Bank Street teaches?
A memory comes to mind of a Black third grade boy at the “no tolerance” school. Oftentimes, you would see him out in the hallway, talking, talking, talking. And you would see a teacher – almost always a young white twenty-something woman –standing over him just saying, stop, stop, stop.
In that moment, his voice isn't being heard. Nobody's giving him space to express himself, or defend himself. No one is hearing his thoughts on whatever dynamic and situation he is in.
Whereas with Bank Street, you are co-constructing meaning, whether that's in a social relationship with a student or in academics. We’re learning alongside a child, and we’re constructing curriculum or activities based on what students are interested in. Our class communities are formed by seeing and celebrating the whole humans in our care. Student voice is essential to building community, rather than a hindrance to teachers carrying out pre-conceived plans. It’s not top-down.
There’s also a different use of space. At that first charter school, we had our charts on the walls – all the things that are going to be poured into a student. With the Bank Street approach, sure, you have a map in your head as a teacher and a creator of these experiences, but there's a certain sense of, “Well, we don't know where we're going to go until we actually go there together and we know who’s going with us.” The classroom itself even remains blank until the students arrive, and until we learn about their identities and interests. Spaces reflect the students learning within.
In that moment, his voice isn't being heard. Nobody's giving him space to express himself, or defend himself. No one is hearing his thoughts on whatever dynamic and situation he is in. Whereas with Bank Street…student voice is essential to building community, rather than a hindrance to teachers carrying out pre-conceived plans. — Rachel McEvoy
You’re articulating so many things I love about teaching, and in particular the Bank Street approach. What was it like to take those ideals back out into the world of New York City schools?
Well, in my first year after Bank Street, I felt like I really took that “We don't know where we're going” notion to an ineffective extreme. (Laughs.) I learned that you do need structure.
This is particularly true in an integrated co-teaching (ICT) setting, where I taught first. In these settings, a certain number of students in the class have a diagnosis that impacts their learning in some way. These students have an individualized educational program (IEP), and they are learning alongside students who don't. There are two teachers, a general education teacher and a special education teacher. Add to this setting a fraught relationship with my co-teacher that first year and you get a learning environment that was often, regrettably, unsafe for students. I think about that first class a lot.
It can be hard to revisit our first year teaching experiences. There's so much that we would go back and do differently. I think it's really helpful to share that for people who are new to the profession. I don't know a single one of us that would say we nailed it on the first try. And figuring out the right balance between structure and space is a really classic community-building challenge.
Could you say more about what you have learned about that?
I’ll give an example: I had a student who had autism, and he benefited from a predictable routine.. If there was a change coming up, it was helpful to preview it with him and answer any questions and give him time to process it. This really allowed him to relax, and freed up his attention for learning. However, many times, we strayed off course that year with short or no notice at all to students. Another student went home and told his mom, “We keep skipping parts of the schedule!” So this friend with autism struggled, because he was working overtime to make sense of what was needed of him due to poor planning by the adults charged with his care. Maybe another kid who didn't have that same learning profile didn't need that. When thinking about a community that has both structure and space, we need to ask, “How can we create a community that takes everybody's needs into consideration – such as those who need more structure, and those who need less?” We also want kids to be thinking, “Even if I don’t need the same support … how can I still show patience and understanding for those who do?”
To give a positive, seemingly simple example in comparison, in one of my student teaching placements, they had choice time, in which kids would choose their activity, activities that had been chosen based on student interests – there’s the space. Their system for choosing took a variety of needs into consideration. Teachers first previewed available activities and posted the options on the board with words and pictures. Teachers chose kids’ names at random to ensure greater fairness in the order of choosing. Kids were ready to make their choice when their name was called because they had been given time to consider the options. There’s the structure.
Even if one kid didn’t need all the parts of that process – for example, if they didn’t need the picture on the cards because they had access to the language on them, or didn’t need the same amount of processing time– the teachers still created a system that took everyone’s needs and preferences into consideration. That balance allows everybody to relax into what's going to happen.
Those are great examples. And to create all of those balanced moments, for so many kids, takes a lot of work!
Given that, you and I have both in recent years spent time in a different role – that of an intervention teacher, in which you work with kids one on one or in small group settings, often in a smaller space. I think this is something that a lot of classroom teachers are curious about doing – in particular, highly sensitive people who learn, after spending time with 30 or 60 or 90 kids day in and day out, that they want to stay in the profession, but they need a different role. I'm wondering if you could talk about that shift, from one community-tending space to another.
The sustainability of my nervous system was definitely a consideration. I also was tending to the part of the work that I liked the most, which was thinking about how to provide access to learners who might struggle in a large class because they need something different to be successful than a majority of their classmates. For example, maybe they're reading at a different level than their peers. Maybe they're learning English. Maybe sensorially, it's just really hard to be in such a large space with a lot of stimuli. Maybe they need extra time to process and synthesize information. Being creative about how to include these students in learning, and also empowering them as learners – those were the most interesting parts of the classroom work. I was feeling like I had little time to do that well due to the ever-increasing list of to-dos for classroom teachers and growing class sizes. I liked the idea of focusing less on how to move a large community of learners, and more on deep diving into understanding and meeting the often complex needs of this smaller groups of students.
In my experience with the role, it does sort of feel like going from being a mallet to being a chisel.
Yes. You get to just do this sort of finer, more detailed work sometimes.
I want to point out, too, that this role may be unfamiliar to many parents, because this model of education is very different from the way that a lot of us were educated. We might remember that there was a “Resource Room,” for example, and students who spent most of the day there. When students are referred to an intervention teacher, or they are being evaluated to see if they qualify for other special education services, I think parents fear that this is where their children are headed. But more often nowadays, at least in New York City, you’ll see more balance between structure and space, meaning this detailed work they get to do with you, and then what they get to do with their peers in what we’d term a “less restrictive” setting, respectively. What does this look like in practice?
I might be in their classroom supporting them with the work that the rest of the class is doing. I may modify tasks or presentation of information to provide them with more access in some way. Even when I do work with students in my room, it is always connected to the work they're doing in their classroom, so that they can feel that, “Oh, yes, this is an extension of exactly what I did with my teacher and what my peers are doing.” Or they can see how it builds to that or stems from that.
Other times, you do get to bring them into your own special space – but often students really enjoy going to the intervention room, because educators like you take care to make them inviting and student-centered spaces. Done right, it can feel much more like a special clubhouse than a penal colony. How do you set up your space along these lines, so that it becomes another support in their learning journey?
I look at it as trying to balance what will be a therapeutic retreat for me, as well as for them. What will be a calm, but also an exciting and engaging space, for them to come into?
One example: Early on in the year we make language portraits to put on the walls or door, which are currently blank and scuffed. There are many multilingual learners at my school and these portraits celebrate the fullness of their identities by mapping their languages onto the shape of a person. Maybe one portrait will show that you think in Spanish, but you speak in English. We even use some sign language at our school, and so kids might color the tips of their fingers to represent the role “ASL” plays in their life. I also have students illustrate name tags for their bins or seat sacks with people, places, foods and experiences that are important to them.).Always, in some way, I’m teaching the students to tend the space themselves.
At the same time,I talk with them about some of the choices I have made without them. There are no windows, so I always try to bring in some element of nature, like trees and water. I use that to talk about the ocean and natural spaces in Oregon and what that place, and my space now, means to me.
I think about this a lot, and it comes up a lot in my discussions with parents, in which they talk about their kids' stuff taking over the space, or they talk about their kids' activities taking over their schedules. And part of me is wondering, “Why shouldn't you get to be part of it? Why shouldn't it be our space?” Because any space in which we teach, parent or facilitate is our space too, whether we claim it or not. It’s easy to know this when it’s our workplace; I wonder if it’s harder to know this at home.
I appreciate that. I think kids are also sometimes waiting for us to claim that power. I think there's a tension there that's not necessarily resolvable, between their needs and our needs. But given the overall goal of what we come to do in a classroom, which can vary based on school, to have everything be a choice for students can take away from other goals.
Part of the role of facilitator, as I see it, is that I'm intentionally thinking how to balance student choice and my decisions for the community in order to serve our collective learning goals.
Relatedly, my husband is transitioning my small child to bed and saying, “I would really like it if you would just go.” Which he is. But my son is also doing so while singing the Spiderman song. So there’s where he gets to exercise choice, haha. Balance!
Related reading
Mourning and re-making the real village: On learning from old-growth forests and Indigenous cultures about how to build community.
Meeting the future halfway: On reading The Giver with seventh graders on Zoom while tending a baby during the pandemic, and what it taught me.
Passing on an ethics of permission, from coast to coast: exploring the question of how we might convey our values to our children, without centering compliance or conformity.
- on the research behind authoritative vs. authoritarian and permissive parenting, as well as common confusions about these terms.
Other announcements
New circle: I will be joining my dear co-facilitator Emily Marlowe in hosting a new circle for loss parents in October of this year (Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month), so if that is of interest to you or a loved one, please click here. I’m also happy to answer any questions about this in the comments below, or you can email me privately by replying directly to this newsletter.
New sangha for subscribers and friends of this Substack: My friends and I are pulling together a group of caregivers interested in practicing, creating and connecting this fall over Zoom. We’re thinking of offering some guided meditation, brief teachings and writing prompts, and opportunities to share what’s coming up in your life as a caregiver, in a mics-on circle format. Are you interested in joining our small startup sangha? If so, please share your info here in this brief form. (All info will be kept confidential, and we won’t share your email address with anyone.) We’d love to hear from you!
Protecting bodily autonomy
As mentioned above, October is Pregnancy Loss Awareness Month. This year in the U.S., we are having important conversations about the fact that abortion care is healthcare — not only for people who are choosing to end unwanted pregnancies, but also for people who find themselves losing or needing to terminate profoundly wanted pregnancies. The Center for Reproductive Rights has been pushing back on authoritarian approaches to pregnant people’s bodies, and advocating for much better policy that meets all needs. All proceeds from this post and others in October will go towards supporting this organization. (For other organizations who are doing great work in this field, see this deeply-researched roundup from
.)
I so appreciate this conversation! I’m a nanny now, but originally studied elementary ed, and this kind of conversation could really have helped me make sense of “classroom management”, something I struggled with so much that I could not finish my teaching program. I deeply value allowing children to have autonomy in their lives (from birth!), while at the same time I see how they thrive with a degree of adult-provided structure/ predictability, and find that many conversations on the topic are black & white and reductive. Would that every teacher had this training! 🙏🏻