Here are a few concrete examples for “putting the brakes on time” and strengthening relationships in the classroom and school. I’d love to hear thoughts from blog readers about these and also to hear things you are trying in your teaching approaches and practices.

• Anticipate and prepare for the relationships you are in, whether as a parent, teacher or administrator. If you tend to answer the question, “How are you?’ with the word “BUSY”, it is likely that you feel you have no time, that life is too full, that you feel overwhelmed with expectation and demands, and sometimes you feel you hardly know the children you teach, your significant other or your own children. The discipline of preparing for relationships on a daily basis is at least as important as lesson planning, but different in nature. I’ve tried to practice this consciously since hearing this story:

A young and successful pediatrician tells how she has added something to her daily rounds and appointments that has made a significant difference for her and her patients. As she picks up a patient’s chart on the door outside the hospital or examining room, she reviews the diagnosis or problem being presented and then closes her eyes, breathes and visualizes the person, if it is a returning patient, or opens herself to deep listening if it is someone new.

As a principal each morning during our official “Moment of Silence” I hold each staff member by name, especially those with illness or other serious issues in their lives and seek and ask for inner peace in a day that may not always be peaceful. I try not to walk into a classroom without similarly reflecting on what I might be walking into or who I am going to be in relationship with.

• In your school schedules, especially for transitions from class to specials and back again we must build time in so these classes are not back to back. Even five real minutes between classes can save a special area teacher from insanity and allow for a reasonable amount of time for movement from one place to another. We can only put so many planes in a holding pattern at the same time without unfortunate consequences. Such time will slow the pace of school.

• For creating interludes – use music … think musical interlude. Make the music predictable by making it repetitious and timed to the length of the interlude you are using it for. For instance, a “clean-up” song that everyone knows will be put on after a project time or the end of an ELA block with the expectation that all materials and supplies, books and papers will be in their proper places by the time the music stops. Make the song long enough to make the task reasonable and relaxed by ending the period with enough time to include the interlude.

Once the children have had a little repetitive experience, they will handle clean-up in a more relaxed manner and so will you. Your expectations will now be more non-verbal. Interludes of music when children return from lunch or recess or before dismissal at the end of the day can change the mood, minds and attention of children.

While the idea of a “Mozart Effect” has been largely disproved scientifically, we do know that music activates both sides of the brain and provides a break from a steady diet of words. Music, when combined with movement, also provides a release for tension that can help restore attention. Our children became enamored with jumping rope to music after a demonstration from another school team (from Vermont) and seeing the Disney Movie “Jump It” in the upper grades. Out of this came our own Feisty Tigers Jump Rope Club run by two graduate student interns at recess.

• We all talk too much as teachers. Non-verbal communication has great power in the classroom. It de-escalates anger. It allows us to listen. It makes children feel respected. There are so many ways we can reduce our words. Just knowing that it adds value to the classroom to use non-verbal strategies is a good place to start as a teacher. Practice your own ability to listen and observe instead of talking a few minutes every day. Replacing talking with writing also has enormous impact on children. Every positive note left on a child’s desk, put in their folder, written in their Reading Response Log, sent in a note to a parent is twice as valuable as verbal reinforcement, when used sparingly. Reminder notes are helpful too and do not have a tone of voice. I know many parents send notes in the lunchbox. We should take a lesson from them.

Add your ideas!