My grandfather once told me, “The older I get, the longer the days and the shorter the years.” I guess that’s why every year I am surprised when August rolls around. It is once again time to prepare to welcome old and new friends to the classroom!
We have so many goals and ambitions for these first days and weeks: getting to know children and families, establishing routines and procedures, assessing academic abilities and needs, and more. Sometimes, these back-to-school whirlwinds distract us from one of our most important tasks for these first days: laying a pathway to normalization. Making normalization a priority from the beginning lays the foundation of a working environment that will pay dividends for the rest of the year.
What Normalization is… and isn’t
Dr. Montessori described four characteristics of normalization: the love of work, concentration, self-discipline, and sociability (feelings of empathy for the group). When children love learning, the work itself creates a level of focus that is sustainable in spite of distractions. This is more powerful and effective than the focus that comes from compliance with classroom expectations and other extrinsic motivators. While both can result in children working quietly and productively, the focus born of normalization comes from within the child. Children can tap into it whether we are there to manage the work environment around them or not.
It is important to acknowledge that we cannot normalize the child. Normalization is their own work that they will accomplish in their own time. But we can create conditions that foster normalization. Dr. Montessori described Normalizing Events as occasions where a child engages with work freely chosen, gathers what is needed, completes the work, and returns the work to the shelf. Thanks to modern neuroscience, we also know that completing a normalizing event releases a little boost of feel-good chemicals that say, “That was good; let’s do that again”. Every normalizing event creates the desire for another normalizing event. The process becomes self-reinforcing.
Crafting Normalizing Opportunities
Creating opportunities for Normalizing Events does not require additional materials, lessons, or time! All it requires is intentionality and a bit of trust in the children.
In all likelihood, you already have planned get-acquainted games, activities to create desk/cubby/locker tags, and your first grace-and-courtesy lessons to establish norms for interacting in a community. You probably know how you are going to assess children’s skills. You likely have chosen the first read-aloud of the year and a few whole-class or large-group lessons that will provide some follow-up work opportunities. But what about all the in-between times?
Unstructured time during the work cycle can be prime time for fostering Normalizing Events. The key is to have at least as many enticing optional works as required works. This necessitates a slightly different mindset and modus operandi for these early days.
- Embrace the idea that no child will choose every option. Ideally, we have enough options that children must make choices – they can’t do them all. That way, we avoid children thinking that options are thinly veiled tasks-that-must-be-completed.
- Worry less about whether the content is sufficiently challenging or relevant to lessons given or planned. There is plenty of time for that in the coming weeks.
- Adopt a simplified record-keeping system for these early days. Note only what choices children made, how deeply engaged they seemed with their choices, and, if appropriate, with whom they collaborated on the work.
- Observe! Over a couple of weeks, note what subject matter each child is drawn to and clues about their preferred learning styles. Notice who the leaders and followers are, and whether the social dynamic changes depending upon the situation.
- Identify which lessons on executive functioning skills would have the greatest impact on most children. Learn who has trouble making choices (your present or future wanderers). Providing effective EF support for these children before the heavy academics start isolates the difficulty. As we know, this increases the probability that the child will be successful.
Enticing Work
What is enticing to one child will be of little interest to another; however, we can say that all work that attracts a child offers some kind of intrinsic motivation. This knowledge provides a useful framework when thinking about work options to offer. The idea-starters that follow are organized around the cornerstones of intrinsic motivation as defined by the Duffys’ brilliant book, Love of Learning. Hopefully, these will stimulate your creative juices and inspire you to try a few ideas this fall.
Choice
- What materials can be offered without a lesson? These materials might be old friends from prior years (Binomial/Trinomial Cube, any familiar sorting work, beloved books, familiar research materials/prompts…). Or they might be materials that have many ways to be successful (tangrams, practical life work, free-reading or story writing…).
- Is there a way to turn something familiar into something with a twist? A child who loves the binomial cube might feel thrilled to try to complete the cube blindfolded. Children who are wild about animals might love creating a game that uses their knowledge. Perhaps they will enjoy using “Parts of” cards to play Concentration or writing questions for an animal-based trivia game.
- Can you sow seeds of sociability? Is there a child in the class who would love to read aloud to others or teach others to finger-weave?
Collaboration
- We often pair children who are new to the classroom with returning children as reading buddies or for activities like touring the classroom. What if we encouraged children to partner on other work? The joy is in partnering on something purposeful. Here are a few random examples:
- Plan a story about a crazy first day of school. Older children may enjoy telling the story from the perspective of the teacher or of the school itself. They might write the story after it is planned if they wish.
- Create a class survey to discover everyone’s favorite type of lesson, class of animal, or flavor of ice cream. After the survey, they can create a beautiful graph to show the results.
- Create a club dedicated to learning about marine life or some other shared passion.
- Pair up with a friend and use a set of flashcards to practice math facts. Or perhaps they create some “Who Am I?” stories about animals or even about shelves of materials.
Challenge
- Rather than focus on whether a particular work provides sufficient challenge, invite children to find something that they feel they do well and teach it to another child. Research shows that the best way to learn something is to teach it to someone else. (See the Protégé Effect)
- Turn something into a friendly competition. For example, if solving the binomial cube blindfolded catches on, add a stopwatch and allow children to time each other.
Content Worth Knowing
- This is the very definition of personal interest work or passion projects. If we think that personal interest work is something that we start after the dust settles – when the class is into a routine and some children seem to have time on their hands – then we are missing an opportunity! A few simple steps can kick off personal interest work:
- Facilitate a brainstorming session about things that the children wish they knew more about. If children stall out, prompt them to think about a diversity of curricular areas. (“Is there anything that sparks your curiosity in Geometry? Botany? Geography? A particular period of history?”) Add topics that you know hold interest for some children. Add topics that don’t exactly fit a curricular category such as snow, the stock market, or Bigfoot.
- Brainstorm ways that children can share what they learn (poster, booklet, model, diagram, skit, slide deck presentation, creating an educational game or a cartoon…).
- From the brainstorming, create a “what” list and a “how” list. Children who wish to do personal interest work choose one from each column.
The rest of the story
While children are engaged in Normalizing Events, you are free to pull individuals or groups for assessments and initial lessons, work with children who have caught your attention one-on-one, and observe. At some point each day, it can be helpful to ask children to reflect on what has given them joy or a sense of pride or self-satisfaction. Additionally, some children may value having the opportunity to show their work or share their experiences with others. A traditional way of doing this is to structure presentation time at class meetings, with everyone in attendance. But it can be done equally effectively by allowing the child to invite a few friends to see their work. In a couple of weeks, as the academics ramp up, encourage children to prioritize any required follow-up work, but with the express goal that the choices that personal interest work will continue throughout the year.
Wishing you a spectacular start to your year –
– Betsy
And the seasons, they go round and round
Joni Mitchell. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NEkJhBHh54
And the painted ponies go up and down
We’re captive on the carousel of time
We can’t return, we can only look
Behind, from where we came
And go round and round and round, in the circle game