A Clean Environment Inside and Out

At 121 we run the detention program at high schools. Schools give us a classroom to use and send us learners from grades 8 to 12 who disobeyed school rules during the previous week. Over the past few years we have made an interesting discovery: the cleaner and better organized the classroom, the better behaved the learners.

There is something about a messy classroom that leaves one feeling one should be messy in the way one relates to others and as a group. The entire atmosphere becomes messy and it becomes increasingly more difficult to maintain control.

At one of the schools there is a classroom we really appreciate. It is always immaculately clean and neat. It is also very cosy. It has interesting and colourful pictures covering its walls. It has large colour photos of learners enjoying class outings. It also has brightly coloured cards stating the class boundaries. For example, the cards state things like ‘respect each other’ and ‘listen to each other’. The moment learners walk into this classroom we sense a difference. It is as if the atmosphere of the classroom rubs off on all of us as we walk in and we all begin to internalize our environment.

At another school we have noticed something similar. We have used the same venue over a number of years. For much of those years the venue, which is full of books and is carpeted, was badly looked after and messy. Books were strewn all over the place and papers and pencil sharpening littered the floor. But this past year the classroom has been neat and organized. There are interesting posters on the wall. The books have been neatly shelved. There is a sense of respect for books and learning. We have noticed a change in learner behaviour.

Before, learners may not have thought twice about dropping papers on the floor or tearing pages out of books strewn about the classroom. Now they tend to throw papers in the bin and books are handled with care. Before, we saw learners scratching on desks. Now that the desks are neatly arranged and the classroom clean, learners seem more reluctant to graffiti the furniture.

Sometimes we look for major interventions to influence learner behaviour but perhaps all it takes is simple things like keeping the classroom clean.

The Kinds of Adults We’re Creating

Quite often when we describe the alternative approach to discipline in high schools that we use at 121, people ask whether a good caning wouldn’t be the solution to disciplinary problems. Here is our response:

A caning is a great short term solution. If you punish a learner enough with corporal punishment and instill sufficient fear in him then perhaps for the duration of his school years he will tow the line. But the question we ask is, what kind of an adult are we creating? Our interest is not in having a learner be well behaved according to the school system for the five years of high schools. Our interest is in instilling values in a young person that will affect the kind of adult they become long after school is finished.

This kind of intervention is not a quick-fix and it doesn’t happen over night. Values need to be taught repeatedly over a period of time. But more importantly than teaching values ‘from the front’ (as information relayed to an audience) they need to be modeled and lived. It is as we model the values we teach that learners start to take notice.

A prime example of this is learners who test us. There are learners that go out of their way to test our boundaries and see what it will take to make us lose our tempers. They’re not testing us so much as they are testing the values we teach. When we look at the topic of anger, we teach them how to turn their anger into effective communication. Instead of raging at another person they learn to channel their anger to something more positive. Of course, at the first opportunity learners test this on us. What would it take to make us angry? If they were to make us angry enough, would we rage at them, thereby undermining our message? This is where lived values become more important than any information we could relay from the front. It is learning in action.

We would love to influence the way learners behave at school. We would love to see them practicing values that are both positive for them and for the people around them in the school environment. But even more than this, we would love these young people to internalize these values for the long term. We would like to impact lives so that we are impacting the very kinds of adults we are creating.

We could give young people a good smack and assume this sorts out their bad behaviour. But what are we depositing into their lives that they can carry into their adult years? Every intervention we design at 121 has the goal of our broader society in mind. Are we releasing into society young people who are able to make a positive contribution to society as adults? This is the real challenge of all educators.