Assertion is one of the five key CARES skills underlying Responsive Classroom practice that help build positive proactive attributes in children both socially and academically. The other four are cooperation, responsibility, empathy, and self-control.

Teaching assertion is the business of raising every voice in the classroom every day with conscious purposefulness.

If we don’t teach children how to be assertive in positive ways, aggression is more apt to be prevalent in school. It is natural for assertiveness and aggression to share the stage in young minds and emotions as children compete for air time, space and pecking order in classrooms, in lunch rooms, and on playgrounds. Teachers, administrators, and other adults in school have the important job of fine-tuning their awareness to pick up on the difference between assertion and aggression. When it feels like the boundary is being crossed, they need to step in and redirect the energy in acceptable directions. Without this vigilance, bullying will fill the vacuum.

This is not always an easy task in a culture that increasing values the race to the top, being the best, the brightest, the most beautiful, voted in or out. Children are confused by the mixed messages of the Pledge of Allegiance, the promises of democracy, and the particular place they may occupy in the classroom or on the school bus. Teachers, and school leaders as well, are challenged by the mounting complexity of multiple mandates of time-on-task accountability to raise academic performance, test scores, and exemplary, caring young citizens.

What to do? For me, it always comes back to the small things:

• Insisting in Morning Meeting that children have time to ask each other relevant questions and listen respectfully to each other’s answers. If that means skipping an activity in the meeting on a given morning so sharing can take a little longer, so be it. The meeting doesn’t have to be any longer that morning, but the listening can be deeper.
• Insisting during academic periods that kids work with different partners frequently. Everybody gets to know and talk with everybody else. Everybody knows everybody else’s voice as well as they know their teacher’s.
• Insisting that no one eats alone or plays alone, that there are lunch invites and play invites and that shy children get to practice their assertion by using the words of invitation with their teacher and then with a friend and then with someone they wish were their friend.

Democracy doesn’t just happen. Neither does bullying. It takes assertion to lift every voice.