Tag: occupational therapy

What’s On the Walls of My Classroom?



In many of the classrooms I inhabited as a student, you’d find the requisite posters of inspiration or quick reference of whatever content was specific to that room – grammar and punctuation, formulas and functions, etc. Later, in high school, Mrs. Henning-Buhr’s room was an amalgam of markers of student expression over the years.

When she found out she had a painter in class, a mural would appear. Projects hung what I’m sure was dangerously from the light fixtures. Echoing the mark I’m sure the courses were taking on us, she invited us to leave our mark on the room.

For my first years as a teacher, all of the above was how I envisioned my classroom. Quotations, student work, the odd mural, painting one side of a drop ceiling tile (because you could turn it over and hide it if you ever had to leave that classroom behind).

The vision shifted when I attended a presentation on occupational therapy. A subject I’d had no prior exposure to, OT principles made me believe everything I put on my walls was a thing a student had to filter out when I was asking for focus on whatever the lesson of the day or moment might be. I was challenging my students to get to what I was trying to teach before I’d even started teaching it.

In the weeks after the presentation, everything came off my walls. I even asked a volunteer parent to sew curtains to put on tension rods covering the distraction of books on my book shelves. I went all in.

The walls of my classroom stayed that way until I realized they shouldn’t exist. The Museum on the Seam’s Coexistence exhibit came through the district in which I was teaching, and we able to get a field trip approved to take all of my students. Stepping off the bus, I gave my camera to a student and said, “Document this.”

Set up in a park down by the local bay, the exhibit was a collection of billboard size artistic interpretations of the theme matched with quotations from historical figures relevant to the art.

Students roved the park taking notes–or not. We ate lunch, enjoyed the park, and loaded the buses at the end of the day to head back to school.

Think of the curtains I would have needed to keep them focused on exactly what I’d determined was important that day.

The conversations following the field trip were rich, and I’m still fascinated and impressed by the roll of film shot by that one student to whom I’d handed the camera.

That trip best sums up the walls of the classroom within my head. It allows the freedom to go out and experience the world and invites pieces of the world otherwise unobtainable into the setting. It recognizes a classroom without walls doesn’t mean a classroom without limits, and that experiences should provoke students to question what’s on the other side of those limits.

117/365 How Can Schools Meet the Developmental Needs of Children? #YearAtMH

I’ve been asked by Sam Chaltain to contribute to the conversation over at EdWeek around the series A Year at Mission Hill. I’ll be offering a take on each episode and interpreting some of the research that might be relevant and trying to make it practical. This piece was originally posted at EdWeek.

Of the many poignant moments in Chapter 4 of A Year at Mission Hill, my favorite is of teacher Jada Brown sitting and rocking a student (1:50). The image, as well as the rest of this episode, helps to draw focus to the physical and socio-emotional needs of students in all schools. Sadly, these are the needs most often lost in the current conversation of how we can build the sorts of schools our students most sorely need.

As Mission Hill’s teachers repeatedly point out (and as any teacher who works with children knows), students who step into our classrooms do not come into existence the moment they cross the threshold into the school building. They bring with them all of their experiences, all of their memories, and all of their needs as developed over the course of their lives up to that point.

And, they are children. While the majority of adults can filter these things as they move through their days socially and professionally, students often do not have such filters in place; they are at various stages of developing the tools needed to manage their interactions with others and intrapersonally.

While full-inclusion schools such as Mission Hill are also working with students with more pronounced needs around the management of their emotions and the filtering of stimuli, it’s worth noting that this work is important for all children.

Learning is better when we attend to the needs of the whole child.

Such is the reasoning behind ASCD’s Whole Child Initiative. Launched in 2007, the Initiative is designed to widen the narrowing thinking about what it means to educate children and prepare them for their futures based on the following tenets:

  • Each student enters school healthy and learns about and practices a healthy lifestyle.
  • Each student learns in an environment that is physically and emotionally safe for students and adults.
  • Each student is actively engaged in learning and is connected to the school and broader community.
  • Each student has access to personalized learning and is supported by qualified, caring adults.
  • Each student is challenged academically and prepared for success in college or further study and for employment and participation in a global environment.

Recognizing that sending these tenets out into the world alone would only help a certain segment of the teaching population, ASCD and its partner organizations have compiled research and action plans to help teachers and school communities begin the process of setting their unique courses to better supporting the children in their care. These are the types of conversations we see embedded throughout the practice of the teachers at Mission Hill.

Returning to the image of Jada Brown comforting her student in the rocking chair, it is important to look more deeply at what is happening in the scene. Yes, there is socialized comfort at play. Brown is offering a safe mental and emotional space for the student and likely offering helpful verbal de-stressors.

Another key component often overlooked or never considered in most schools and classrooms is the balancing of the student’s sensory diet Brown is offering through her positive touch and the rhythmic rocking of the chair. In short, she is helping to balance the chemistry of the student’s brain toward the goal of greater control of behavioral outputs. It’s the kind of work occupational therapists like the late Bonnie Hanschu do every day: considering how students’ tactile, proprioceptive, and vestibular systems can be brought into greater harmony. Sadly, it’s also the kind of work many teachers never hear about in their pre-service or professional development work.

For more information on occupational therapy, try these resources compiled by the American Occupational Therapy Association.

Seeing the students in our care as their whole selves and building our understanding of how strong physical, sensory, and socioemotional supports work together to build clear pathways to academic success is work worth doing. More than that, it is work that must be done.