Kindergarten: A Teacher, Her Students, and a Year of Learning

by Diamond, Julie

  What’s the teacher’s role, for example, if we want to encourage truly open discussions? If teachers don’t moderate discussions, how do we prevent the more aggressive and confident children from drowning out the slower and quieter ones? If we want to avoid intervening, what do we do about the voices that seem never to be heard in public? Yet in stepping in to moderate discussions, teachers may be motivated more by the wish to protect themselves , fearing that things will spin out of control. Teachers may wish to maintain control of the traffic of ideas and knowledge to protect themselves against the unsettling sense that they’re in the backseat. They may worry about the result of too much spontaneity—children’s straying off topic, their side comments to each other, their possibly anarchic hilarity. When do teacher interventions protect the group against monopolizing or boring speakers, and when do they rob the group of the opportunity to develop social norms?

  In general and on a daily basis, teachers have a dilemma in terms of routines and behavior. Principles govern decisions about when to intervene, but no rules cover all cases; decision making is difficult because each situation is unique. As Charney notes, “There are no perfect arrangements.” 19 Perhaps teachers’ conflicts about when and how to intervene reflect the necessary and inevitable conflict between group needs and individual needs.

  I want to conclude a consideration of routines with a plea for occasional inconsistency. Consistency is generally a good thing: children feel comfortable when they know what to expect, and they are disturbed by unexpected changes in routine. When a teacher is forced to switch things around after routines have been established, there is a price to pay in children’s unsettledness, and certain children may become distressed. Children are also likely to protest if adults seem to apply shifting standards of behavior: “You said . . .” But changes in plans can’t always be helped, either for reasons outside a teacher’s control or because for some reason a teacher decides to do things differently on a particular day. A teacher may also make an exception for one child (e.g., by adjusting an assignment that would present an overwhelming challenge for the child, or adjusting behavioral expectations). The yardstick here is whether inconsistency in standards has a basis in competing educational goals rather than favoritism. Children allow exceptions when they see the reasons for them, when it doesn’t seem that one child is getting away with something generally not allowed.

  Inconsistencies are inevitable: I’m inconsistent at the end of the day: I’m running late, my energy is low, all the frayed bits seem to catch up with me, and I let routines slide. There are also the inevitable differences between the expectations established at school and those at home. Children admonish their parents, “That’s not how we do it at school!” and may also complain to their teachers, “But my mother lets me!” As long as the differences are not too great—e.g., when parents’ code of behavior calls for children’s physical defense of themselves and teachers require children to “use words” or get adult help—children learn to live with different standards.

  Overall, negotiating differences is helpful to children. When teachers are rigidly consistent, children don’t gain the experience of confronting conflicting goals. They don’t develop tolerance for inconsistencies; they don’t gain flexibility; they don’t learn to make well-reasoned judgments. Human experience is fluid. We want children to be able to tolerate ambivalence and doubt when the situation calls for it. Teachers, too, must be prepared to do things differently on occasion, and to reflect on whether inconsistencies are justified.

  The Click Club: Sharing Power

  The children use markers on the very first day. I show the class where the markers go, and demonstrate how to close the marker: listen for the click! The word click is an aid to memory. In the first weeks, as the class is drawing pictures and designs, I say again and again, “You remembered to click!” When I find a marker with the top off, I sometimes stop the class: “Look up! What do you see here?” Denay loves these demonstrations, and comes up to me frequently to show me a marker with its top off. I let Denay make the announcement: “Look up! Denay has something to show everyone!” and she holds up the marker. Soon others are bringing me markers they found left open. One day I say, “Denay, you always remember, you are in the Click Club!” Soon others tell me, “I’m in the Click Club.” This is around the same time that the children are making name lists, copying names from the name cards. Denay takes a clipboard and writes CKCB (Click Club), and she goes around to everyone asking, “Are you in the Click Club?” They sign their names on her list.

  Routines help us remember what to do and how to do it. Rituals, on the other hand, have elements that are not purely practical. The example above has layers of meaning: shy Denay finds a way to make a place for herself in this new classroom. There is a bit of showing off for the teacher, and attention from the teacher for model behavior. Eager to please, Denay makes her mark (so to speak) by taking on the teacher’s role as she goes around the room with her clipboard, writing down names. There’s drama too, and words that are alliterative and onomatopoeic, which cement the whole thing.

  Rituals have complex meanings and are often connected with power and participation. By giving Denay room to take this role, I share power over the enforcement of standards of behavior; I diffuse power through a ritual that Denay helped invent. If routines reflect the teacher’s wish for a classroom environment in which productive learning can take place, children’s rituals can be seen as responses to the teacher’s hegemony over the environment. Rituals often have a moral core: they communicate information about values, about what’s right and wrong.

  I am looking here at rituals that children initiate; I am not interested in rituals that are imposed solely by teachers. Classroom rituals can include the distinctive use of a particular material—children’s use of clipboards to make lists or do surveys; songs or chants that children associate with a particular time of the day; their idiosyncratic phrases or ways of writing or drawing: Adam is writing in “fat letters”—block letters—Philip is doing it too; who else? A kind of contagion, everyone is trying it. These classroom rituals take two forms: a ritualized form of a routine or activity, in which children interpret the activity in a repetitive and personalized way (and by doing so, also see themselves as initiators); and a ritual that is, in effect, an antiroutine, in which children’s version of the routine is slightly skewed or even outrightly defiant. Rituals answer back adult authority, with its multiplicity of demands and limitations on children’s activity. Rituals are a way that children reconcile themselves to the very real limitations on their power. When children invent a way of interpreting the teacher’s expectations, they save face, complying without being merely compliant. They submit without being submissive.

  By sharing power, the teacher strengthens the commitment of the group as a whole to a system of classroom governance that has legitimacy. When teachers endorse rituals that arise spontaneously, a class culture is formed that accommodates adult goals and children’s inventiveness. There may be holdouts—children whose involvement with other children is tenuous, children who act surreptitiously rather than publicly (e.g., scribbling on tables)—but the group appears to act in concert. This can be true even when rituals are energetically transgressive:

  One year, in the fall, I accidentally held the name cards upside down as I took attendance. The children were gleeful, and the next day, asked me to do it that way again. They were, perhaps, seeing what they could get away with—what they could control in this new classroom. This became a frequent request. One day, some children wanted the cards held upside down, and other children objected. We had a vote. The results struck me: with the exception of one girl, all the girls voted for right side up; with the exception of one boy, all the boys voted for upside down.

  The incident is fascinating and certainly encourages speculation: did the split along gender lines represent the girls’ preference for tradition and continuity? Were the boys favoring adventure and challenge? Whatever
lay behind the vote, the outcome satisfied both sides: after some discussion, we decided I would hold the name cards upside down on some days, and right side up on other days, a routine that continued throughout that fall and that the children accepted with the occasional protest. They learned they could make an innovation, a spin on routine, and the teacher accepted their power to do this. In addition, they had seen how, through discussion and voting, a plan of action could become institutionalized within the semidemocratic world of this classroom. They learned that they themselves could play a role in shaping class routines, and they’d also learned a process of decision making. These were valuable lessons, although I hadn’t planned them.

  When children’s natural playfulness takes the form of innovation, and teachers allow this innovation to become institutionalized, children develop a stronger sense of belonging, of commitment to their place in this classroom. The social role of rituals in general is to aid in the development of a group’s identity, whether the group is religious or secular. Rituals mediate the relationship between the individual and the group, between personal preferences and group demands for adherence to recognized behavioral norms. (Perhaps for this reason, rituals are often concerned with transitional periods in human lives and in the cycles of time; many classroom rituals arise during times of transition from one activity to the next.)

  Classroom rituals create group feeling as children gain power and a sense of identity and solidarity through the enactment of common actions and meanings. Dewey’s concept of social control is relevant in explaining the contagiousness of children’s rituals. He describes children as “cooperative or interacting parts” of a “whole situation.”20 Thus, the classroom itself changes as children introduce rituals.

  What Rituals Tell Us

  Brooke said to me, You have to remember, kids read to the class on Wednesday. I’ve been forgetting—weeks ago, I began a routine of letting a child read the story to the class every Wednesday. They would either really read some simple book or hold the book and pretend to read, mimicking me, retelling the story, often hilariously. But I keep forgetting. I said, Brooke, write a note so I’ll remember. She wrote it on a Post-it, KID REDS, and I put it up at the top of the wipe-off board, where the days of the week are written. Brooke’s particular qualities—her steadfast determination to be master of details, of classroom rights and wrongs—are given an outlet, and at the same time, they influence and help form class culture. Not only better adherence to our Wednesday kid-reading routine, but a new idea: you can write notes to Julie.

  Ritual making is a creative act—that is, children invent rituals. For this reason, the forms that rituals take reflect children’s individual motivations, involvements, and characteristics.

  The rituals that catch on, that give the class a discernible group identity, give the teacher material worth thinking about. When teachers look closely at the rituals their students suggest and implement, they learn who their children really are. Is humor the dominant note? Defiance? Playfulness? Rituals can be negative as well as positive: a class can develop a rash of writing on tables, or children can take to disrupting the teacher or other children by yelling out certain mocking phrases. Tattling can become a ritualized response to any perceived injury or infraction: “I’m telling!” one student barks at another, a threat put immediately into effect. The tattling child struts toward the teacher, and the offending child chases after, tearfully shouting, “I said I’m sorry! I said I’m sorry!” The ritualized nature of this interaction makes it harder to stop, irritating as it may be to the teacher. Nevertheless, it makes clear to the teacher what’s at stake for these individual children. No matter how many times the teacher says to the tattling child, “Talk to the other child first, before you come to me,” for this child, something else matters more, perhaps the immediate gratification of getting the teacher on her side when she feels injured, indignant, and righteous. The teacher’s job is to look for some other means by which a child can gain a sense of being in the right, one that doesn’t come at another child’s expense.

  When negative rituals gain ascendancy in a classroom, teachers must examine various aspects of classroom life. It may be that children’s energies have been pent up and that more time is needed for exploration, project making, music, and movement. It may be that individual children are seeking more power, a way to be leaders. To the extent that a negative ritual interferes with classroom functioning, the teacher can make it the subject of discussion with the class as a whole. Yet it is wise to remember that rituals may die out, especially if a teacher can gain some understanding of their genesis.

  Which actions or bits of behavior are likely to be turned into rituals? What catches on? Because their function is not primarily practical, rituals matter in a way that is not rational or obvious. Rituals have a magical utility, a meaning that’s not always apparent but that is accessible to children, which they pass on to each other without explanations. Ritual elements may exist as part of various ordinary classroom activities. Why do children write in block letters? There is a ritualized quality in many of the activities that children repeat in classrooms. It’s as if children must take up some everyday classroom routine or material or activity and imbue it with a meaning that they themselves intuit.

  Rituals transform an act that might otherwise be ordinary. Children often master the printing of letters by the spring of their kindergarten year. They begin to write in some fancy way, making fat block letters, or writing their letters in alternating colors, or pretending to write script. Confident in their printing ability, they must wring some change in the skill, must transform the act of writing. In some cases, rituals are more obviously concerned with power relationships: Linda tells me what’s been happening in her second-grade class. She’s been reading chapter books aloud to the class, and she always sits on a table on the opposite side of the room from the blue chair that is her usual seat. Whenever she is about to read, she moves a chair around for her feet. Now, the children check out the schedule, and at the end of the period before she’s going to read, someone shifts the chair around for her, and someone else gets the book the class is currently reading and places it on the table. This, of course, was never discussed, never planned by anyone. The children in Linda’s class, by turning the chair and getting the book for her, were, in a small way, making a power grab: we’ll do it, we’ll take over this job.

  Children like repeating certain words or phrases. “Questions or comments?” they ask after sharing their journal pages, and the ritual question turns them into the leaders of the discussion. Other ritual phrases arise as children play with words and sounds. Shouted out and repeated, these phrases transform classroom social relationships, as children’s chanting in unison draws them together, or makes outsiders of other children or adults. Susan Isaacs describes the children in her school initiating a ritual around the towels used to dry lunch dishes. The children were responsible for their own washing and drying, and the towels hung on towel rails. “Every day before lunch, they rush to the towel rail and take one of the towels up, touch it, and hold on to it for a few minutes. Today, about the middle of the morning, they rushed to do this, and each hung on to his towel, saying, ‘Save, save, save!’ Mrs. [Isaacs] asked them, ‘Please don’t hang on to the towel rail—you may break it.’ ‘All right, we won’t, but we want to save it for a bit longer,’ repeating the gesture and the word, as if these made the towels belong inherently to them thereafter.” 21 The children here seem to be reveling in their recognition of a shared possessiveness, but their repetition of action and words points to the powerful function of ritual in cementing group feeling.

  Perhaps some children are especially adept at apprehending which actions or communications have potential as rituals. These children develop a way of doing things—they move a chair or shout out a word (“Save!”), which is repeated by child after child until it has become an authentic element of the environment. Rituals spread mysteriously, gathering significance as they are shar
ed and even altered by different children. Which rituals will take hold in a classroom depends on the group itself: the more widely a ritual can be shared and the deeper its common meaning, the greater its power and appeal. Although the values these rituals impart may come to define the classroom community, the exact meaning of the values may be obscure, even impossible to pin down. This is certainly true in the case of the nonsense words that somehow catch on. Yet rituals, whether their meaning is transparent or opaque, perform a powerful function, communicating to each child a sense of solidarity with the others in the class, the specialness of belonging to this classroom, this group. Out of their shared ways of doing things, the children produce a distinctive culture to which each child feels loyalty.

  Rituals have rhythm, a capacity for expressiveness. They are like catchy tunes. For this reason, if a teacher notices children’s uses of rituals and allows them space, rituals can immeasurably enrich and energize classroom culture. Watchfulness and an ability to accept the openings offered by children give a teacher access to this layer of meaning. Rituals cannot be planned for, except in one important sense: a teacher’s experience brings knowledge of what to look for, the ability to recognize a good thing. As discussed earlier, teachers share power when they accept rituals, and that in turn enhances their own authority. We are ultimately the people responsible for our classrooms, for planning routines, and for judging the contribution of rituals to classroom life, but the children can participate. When they do, they are more likely to see us as allies and to move into a life as students with a feeling of being at home in the classroom.