I was first introduced to the concept of structured recess back when we lived in San Francisco and my wife and I were trying to figure out where to send out oldest daughter for kindergarten.  As we toured some of the schools in San Francisco Unified, several locations mentioned a partnership they had with a non-profit organization, Playworks, to offer what they refered to as structured recess.  Recess is always supervised by adults, but in structured recess, the adults engage the students in games and other structured activities.  In a sense, the adults shift from being supervisory aides waiting and watching for errant or potentially disruptive behavior and become coaches, organizing activities and promoting movement and interaction.  Interestingly, my wife, who is not an educator by formal training, immediately seized on this idea as something that she really liked about the schools that offered it.

Admittedly, I was more skeptical.  I am always a little concerned about adults moving into the spaces where students previously exercised freedom and independence.  It seemed to me that kids need opportunities for autonomy and exploration without the immediate guidance of an adult.  I considered the playground as one of the last bastions of true student freedom on most school campuses.  I also worried about how play structured by adults might interrupt opportunities for more creative and imaginative play.  Children can and do often create imaginary worlds and adventures that I worried might be missed by the games being designed by adults.  

When we moved to Southern California and I began working on the executive team in Santa Ana Unified, I discovered that the movement for structured recess was also quickly taking hold.  This time I was not shopping for schools but leading them, and soon became much more familiar with the data behind the work.  For schools implementing structured recess, playground fights and other incidents of misbehavior plummeted.  Typically, the spaces became more inclusive as a higher percentage of students were actively engaged in the fun.  Suddenly, administrators had far less to worry about at recess time.  While the structured recess program was initially expensive, most of the elementary principals strategically considered the cost worth the benefits.  During my first 2 years in the district, the majority of schools had implemented structured recess.  Eventually, the district decided it could save money by taking on the program internally, hiring and training recess coordinators around the district.

Now in Costa Rica, at the international school where I serve as General Director, we have similarly adopted structured recess.  In our case, it was a suggestion that did not come from me, but as a result for the need to have a better strategy for maintaining social distancing during recess and lunch time.  In the US, many states have relaxed social distancing requirements when students are outside.  In Costa Rica the health protocols require social distancing at all times.  After the first week of school, simply trying to train and supervise students to independently maintain their distance just wasn’t working well enough.  So we hired coaches to design structured recess activities that incorporated the social distancing requirements.  It has worked wonderfully.  While I still am eager to protect spaces for genuine student-led play, my observational data suggests that kids are enjoying the structured recess activities as much or more than they were traditional recess time.    

Usually, when we use the term “student-centeredness” we are referring to schools and classrooms that orient themselves to the needs, ideas, interests, and preferences of students.  It may seem a bit strange for a school to have to state that it is focused on students.  The learning of students is, after all, the core and primary responsibility of educators and educational institutions.  Yet, there are other powerful forces at play in a school or district.  Often, students don’t have formal representation in the decision-making processes or governance structure of the school.  I remember one education consultant I worked with a few years ago somewhat cynically tell me that the real constituents of schools are the teachers union, the school board, and parents, in that order.  Admittedly, I’m an optimist who chooses to believe that all stakeholders have a role to play in the design and delivery of our education systems: teachers whose professional lives are dedicated to teaching young people, school boards with a fiduciary and governance duty to schools and who must allocate limited resources, and parents who rightfully advocate for the needs of their children.  

But this blog post is not about the politics of schooling.  It is also not a post about student voice and choice in the school process.  Rather, it is about the literal meaning of the phrase “student centeredness.”  To what degree are our students centered?  A few years ago, I was leading a school where we did some work with McKinsey & Company, looking at our systems of talent management and leadership development.  I was introduced to their concept of “centeredness” as the key leadership trait that predicts organizational health and that leads to what they claimed at  “extraordinary results.”  The idea is that organizational leaders who have a clear sense of purpose, cultivate self-awareness, manage energy and pace their work, and who employ effective strategies for engaging and communicating with their community and stakeholders, are those who have the capacity to transform work culture and get meaningful and measurable results.  

I think something similar could be said in cultivating centeredness in our students.  To what extent do our students have opportunities to explore who they are and what matters most to them, consider their purpose(s) in life, and discuss and practice strategies for managing their energy and organizing their life?  Of course we educate students whose developmental reality is much different from that of adults.  We have students who by biological and psychological definition are not yet fully developed or fully realized human beings.  To some degree, we can’t expect our students to be “centered” in ways we might aspire to for adults.  Yet, I still think there is utility in thinking about schools as spaces where we are cultivating an awareness in our students about their developmental trajectory.  We talk a lot in schools about student ownership of learning.  But how can students own their learning when they don’t necessarily understand the developmental context that they find themselves in?  

For me, student-centeredness would mean that the school has created a space where students situate their learning opportunities and educational programs within an emerging awareness of their developmental progress.  Concretely, it requires that students have an awarness of the stages of human development, the nature of cognition, and what it means to learn.  Student-centeredness, therefore, requires us to move away from traditional notions of “academics” versus “social-emotional learning” and see them as two sides of the same developmental coin that cannot be addressed separately or in isolation of one another.  We would include learning about “life skills,” “leadership skills” or “soft skills” as part of the explicit curriculum, just like we do with literacy, numeracy, or any other content-based curriculum topic.  We would have more class offerings, including core coursework, whose focus was more explicitly dedicated to these matters.  Who says that a course in biology is more important than a course in managing conflict, public speaking, or career planning (state legislatures and local school boards set graduation requirements, so admittedly this still is a post about the politics of schooling)?  We’re living in a moment when many of the settled assumptions about how we handle schooling are being both questioned and in some-cases, validated.  Thoughtfully reconsidering the core curriculum, and how we can enhance student-centeredness as a more deliberate outcome of the school experience, should be on the agenda.   

Yesterday I found myself walking around campus at lunchtime.  Specifically, it was our elementary school lunch, and I was enjoying talking to students and getting their perspectives on how school back on campus was going for them.  Our team has gone to incredible lengths to blend our efforts for normalcy with adherence to safety and health protocols.  This includes the elementary team dividing students into 13 different play areas around the campus, as well as hiring coaches to structure and supervise games and play.

At the center of the main courtyard, right in the middle of the campus, two coaches had organized a large group of 1^st graders into lines for relay races.  Each kid, in succession, ran their way through a simple obstacle course.  What had started as enthusiastic cheering had quickly built into absolute frenetic delight as the teams jumped and cheered and chanted and screamed to encourage their teammates.  I think the noise and energy from these little 1^st graders drowned out anything else happening, and I’m sure it was difficult for the nearby secondary classrooms to ignore the spectacle.  The kids were completely and totally lost in the fun of the moment.   

I had to pause a moment at the scene, myself a little overcome by such a beautiful moment.  Oh how we’ve missed being together on campus!  I’ve told my staff that young people are both remarkably resilient and simultaneously vulnerable.  We have asked so much of them this past year.  We’ve asked them to sit and concentrate and engage through a screen, without much of the physical and emotional interaction and play that is so critical to their development and well-being.  They have been remarkable.  They have done everything we have asked.  It was the best we could do as educators and the best we could offer given the circumstances.  

It’s clear that we are all still battling through a pandemic that doesn’t seem eager to slacken its grip on humanity.  There are still obstacles and we likely will have to learn to live with certain protocols and restrictions for much longer than we had ever thought possible.  But we are also finding ways to take back some of our humanity, and having students on campus for in-person learning certainly seems to qualify as a triumph for our community.  

A few months ago, I finished reading Emotional Agility by Susan David.  I’m a bit of a productivity/self-help nut, and the byline in the title caught my attention – “get unstuck, embrace change, and thrive in work and life.”  Generally speaking, I’m incredibly satistied in my work and profession, but I’m always trying to make sure that I don’t calcify when it comes to learning new things and embracing opportunities for reflection and growth.  Specifically, staying flexible is a real priority for me.  I don’t just want to endure or survive change, I want to embrace change, just like the title of the book says.  

So, I picked up the book and started reading.  The general framework for developing emotional agility, according to David, is comprised of four key elements: 1) show up, 2) step out, 3) walk your why, and 4) move on.  By showing up, we commit to honestly describe and confront our emotions and behaviors.  Then, when we commit to step out, we develop the ability to get outside of ourselves and try to look at our emotions and behaviors with a more detached, objective lens.  Walking your why means staying connected to core values and goals as we analyze our emotions, and then determine whether our daily choices are, in fact, aligned with those values.  Finally, we move on, or commit to keep moving forward.  This can take the form of continuous improvement, slowly tweaking and iterating our way towards better day by day and minute by minute decisions.  Or, sometimes we take a more risky crack at new behaviors, followed by time to allow ourselves to integrate our new actions and practices into our regular routines and ways of working.  

In other words, the book begins with a strong invitation to examine ourselves and our emotional routines.  But the main metaphor and contribution of the book, I believe, is what comes next.   David introduces us to the idea of “the hook.”  That’s not a new term.  As educators, many of us were trained in the Essential Elements of Instruction and the need to start off the daily lesson with a “hook” to get students’ attention and launch into the learning of the day.  In the case of Emotional Agility, “the hook” has a more sinister connotation.  “The hook” here refers to “a self-defeating emotion, thought, or behavior.”  These hooks are thoughts or reactions that drag us down, and are embedded within the scripts that are running in our heads; scripts that predictably take us to emotional places that we don’t necessarily want to be.  The agility part comes when we learn to unhook ourselves and engage in the 4 practices described earlier – to show up, step out, walk your why, and then move on.  Instead of running our scripts on autopilot, we interrupt the emotional algorythym to give ourselves time to objectively analyze our emotional reaction and then deliberately make adjustments that reflect our values and bigger purposes.  It sounds like a straightforward recipe, and would be, if we weren’t talking about emotions.  

My favorite chapter comes towards the end of the book, when David talks at length about how you can teach your children to develop their emotional agility.  As a father of six, I found tips for raising emotionally agile kids to be one of the book’s most practical contributions.   She uses ideas like “fear-walking” and “taking the plunge” to reinforce the idea that parents should help kids acknowledge their fears and identify their emotions, but then to also be skeptical and interrogate those emotions.  She encourages parents to lead by example by articulating the thought routines they use to question their emotional reactions and to craft productive responses.  She also cautions about the overuse of external rewards and stimuli in shaping the behavior of children, worrying that such mechanisms can sometimes bring about the desired behaviors but not the corresponding thought processes that will lead to more productive responses in the future.  

Overall, the book is a strong invitation towards greater self-awareness, and then, self-mastery.  Rather than allowing our emotions and fears to drive our reactions on auto-pilot, our emotional agility is measured by our ability to interrupt our natural reactions and more deliberately and productively rewire ourselves to act in accordance with our values and goals.  

I’ve worked in a lot of school innovation and school redesign spaces over the years, where there always seems to be a strong push for greater integration of technology into the learning experience of young people.  In some camps, the call has been to allow technology to provide students with a completely student adaptive experience, often through a strong component of virtual or hybrid learning.  Even 10 years ago, the push from the education innovation community to get students more personalized online learning was very strong.  I’ve always been a proponent of integrating technology in ways that provide students with greater access to learning opportunities, and where appropriate, as a tool to deepen student engagement and ownership of learning in the classroom.  

Then the pandemic hit, and all of sudden we were forced into a great experiment.  Virtual education for all, and then hybrid education for all.  Of course you could argue that forcing teachers and students into modes of learning that they weren’t exactly prepared for was not a great experimental design.  Certainly the motivation levels of students and staff alike to engage virtually was extremely variable.  I have enough anecdotal experience myself to know that some very strong classroom teachers really struggled with the motivation and ability to transfer their instructional practice to virtual settings, perhaps hoping that they could get back to their classrooms quickly (and the classroom practices they had developed over years).  Things obviously did not turn out exactly that way.  

What is so interesting to me is that after a year of virtual and hybrid learning, when we gave our families the opportunity to choose virtual modalities or to come back in-person full time, the result was near 100% in favor of in-person learning.  In other words, after testing what virtual learning might be, almost everyone opted for something that resembled a more traditional in-person school day.  People protested in the streets to open schools.  In a world where many industries really have been transforming in significant ways, K-12 education again seems less apt to move.    

Certainly, there are shifts that I believe will be permanent.  Many families do prefer the added flexibility of both hybrid and virtual options.  Some families have left their schools on a permanent basis to explore possibilities in online and home school settings.  I don’t have the data in front of me to measure well the size of the market shift, and I imagine that the next few years will see the ongoing fallout and adjustment in the education sector.  But in my own school, the data is pretty clear.  Parents and students mostly want in-person learning.

The other more permanent shift will be stronger integration of technology in our in-person learning settings.  I can say confidently that my staff is much more skilled in their ability to navigate the different systems that make up our virtual suite of programs, including content focused software and the tech platforms that facilitate communication and collaboration.  Before the pandemic, it seemed that many teachers could passively opt-out of some, if not most, tech integrations, with perhaps the acception of attendance and grading software which were typically mandated and enforced.  I believe teachers will more universally be expected to integrate digital tools and communication channels into their regular routines and instructional repertoire.  

Yet despite these shifts, the traditional model of K-12 education seems to be remarkably persistent.  The pandemic gave us a glimpse of what virtual learning and hybrid learning might look like when adopted by a large portion of the education sector.  In my experience at least, that type of adoption is not what families wanted.  It seems the pandemic has validated the core value proposition of teachers and schools – as physical places where students can access structured learning, quality instruction, social interaction and friendships, and safe places for student growth while parents are largely at work.  There will be more opportunities for alternative programs for students and families who don’t want the traditional school experience, and only time will tell how deep the shifts away from traditional school will be.  But from my vantage point, it doesn’t look like computer screens will be replacing our brick and mortar school experience.