Greetings! (08-11-08)

Hello there! Glad you could make it! Thank you so much for choosing my column today. I hope you have an enjoyable read!

This week I attended a wonderful two-day workshop that talked about (among many things) the importance of rituals in school. One of the most important school rituals is the simple act of greeting those who come through the door.

I learned about “conscious discipline,” an approach to creating emotionally safe and loving environments for children. For me, the workshop was an affirmation of all that I believe and all that I try to practice as a school administrator.

Take, for example, greetings. Now, I have for many years, believed that a positive school atmosphere began with a positive greeting. As a teacher, I tried to greet each student as they entered my classroom, and as an administrator, I try to greet each student as they enter my building.

To be honest, I didn’t know why greetings were so vital. I just knew that kids seem to respond to a friendly “Hello!” when they got to school. The conscious discipline workshop backed up the practice of greeting with a more scientific explanation.

Researchers have long known that our brains are pattern seeking. When our brains find familiar and friendly patterns they form positive connections. When confronted with negative patterns or chaotic situations, our brains become stressed causing them to want to regress to a lower brain state.

The workshop identified three such brain states: the “fight, flight, or fool” state, the emotional state, and the reasoning state. When we are in our “fight, flight, or fool” state, we are concerned with only one thing: are we safe?

Now, for me as a principal, whenever I hear the word “safe” my first thought is to physical safety. Do the fire alarms work? What is our crisis plan?” But from the workshop I learned that an even more important aspect of safety involves emotions. If a person, especially a child, feels threatened emotionally, they are more likely to think from their brain stem and either become enraged or to shut down. At the elementary level, I have witnessed such “meltdowns” and now I have scientific understanding of what is going on.

The key is to make the child feel safe. Only then can you help raise them to the emotional state, where they can put words to their feelings. Once you can lead a child to “use their words” to describe how they feel, then it becomes possible to lead them to the reasoning brain state, where the child can learn.

Humans switch between these three state constantly, and often exist partially in two at the same time. The key, according to conscious discipline, is to be disciplined in your consciousness of your own state and the states of those around you.

In other words, once you can recognize why a child is acting the way they are acting, you can address it and hopefully bring about some meaningful learning. We are in the business of education after all.

So, where does greetings fit into all this? Greetings are perhaps the most basic and easy to perform ritual that helps kids feel safe, welcome, and connected. And not just kids. When someone enters a business, or a church, or another’s home, and he or she is greeted, it helps that person to relax. It is just common sense that when you are relaxed, you are going to be more productive, more able to handle stress, and have a greater capacity to learn.

So while much of what was covered in the conscious discipline turned out to be good old-fashioned common sense, I appreciated the scientific detail. Now I feel validated in what I do. I look forward to having students back so I can continue to practice and improve my warm and friendly greetings.

Thank you so much for reading my column today! Have a great week and I hope to see you back here next week. Goodbye!