It was a rocky first few months for me as the new principal of an elementary school serving low-income kids in Oakland, California. Virtually every day a teacher would bring pairs of students into my office—the boys for shoving and fighting, and the girls for verbal spats. I tried to the best of my ability to resolve the immediate situation, mete out the right level of discipline and get these kids ready enough to go back to class.
What I didn’t know was who, exactly, was the perpetrator and who, exactly, was the target. What I did know was that neither student was emotionally ready to go back to class.
Some of the more complex and deep-seated conflicts could linger for days and weeks, even as we mobilized social workers and psychologists to work with them and their parents and guardians. My staff and I were gerbils on a treadmill.
In my zeal to help individual students, I was blind to where and when these conflicts were taking place. Then it hit me—the sudden realization near the end of my first year that nearly all these incidents occurred on the playground! It was then that I turned to Playworks, the brainchild of the social entrepreneur, Jill Vialet, a nonprofit organization that puts a trained specialist in cooperative play on the playground all day, every day.
When the next school year started and with Playworks in place, the steady stream of students coming to my office turned into a trickle. Students, less on edge, began feeling safer and as a result they became better learners. With the benefit of twenty-twenty hindsight, the solution to the school’s discipline problem was simple: change the situation to change student behavior. This is an “indirect approach” to change.
And, that’s not the end to the story. The transformation of the playground offered an unseen gift to the students—through joyful play a greater capacity for imagination and creativity—and more systemically it effected a transformation of the school’s culture. With far fewer disciplinary cases to contend with, teachers were better able to address the needs of the whole class, not on a few disrupters. Parents were more eager to volunteer. And we administrators were freed up to be educators.
As the school climate improved, another important lesson came clear: change in one area of school life can lead to significant change in another area of school life. All this for just one percent of my annual operating budget. That’s the power of leverage. We merely redirected the energy that was already there.
The story of Jill Vialet and Playworks is one of a number of powerful stories in this website. Her approach to change is both direct and indirect. That individual student’s lives were improved through instruction on the playground is the direct part. That the school as a whole was strengthened is the indirect part.
What I didn’t know was who, exactly, was the perpetrator and who, exactly, was the target. What I did know was that neither student was emotionally ready to go back to class.
Some of the more complex and deep-seated conflicts could linger for days and weeks, even as we mobilized social workers and psychologists to work with them and their parents and guardians. My staff and I were gerbils on a treadmill.
In my zeal to help individual students, I was blind to where and when these conflicts were taking place. Then it hit me—the sudden realization near the end of my first year that nearly all these incidents occurred on the playground! It was then that I turned to Playworks, the brainchild of the social entrepreneur, Jill Vialet, a nonprofit organization that puts a trained specialist in cooperative play on the playground all day, every day.
When the next school year started and with Playworks in place, the steady stream of students coming to my office turned into a trickle. Students, less on edge, began feeling safer and as a result they became better learners. With the benefit of twenty-twenty hindsight, the solution to the school’s discipline problem was simple: change the situation to change student behavior. This is an “indirect approach” to change.
And, that’s not the end to the story. The transformation of the playground offered an unseen gift to the students—through joyful play a greater capacity for imagination and creativity—and more systemically it effected a transformation of the school’s culture. With far fewer disciplinary cases to contend with, teachers were better able to address the needs of the whole class, not on a few disrupters. Parents were more eager to volunteer. And we administrators were freed up to be educators.
As the school climate improved, another important lesson came clear: change in one area of school life can lead to significant change in another area of school life. All this for just one percent of my annual operating budget. That’s the power of leverage. We merely redirected the energy that was already there.
The story of Jill Vialet and Playworks is one of a number of powerful stories in this website. Her approach to change is both direct and indirect. That individual student’s lives were improved through instruction on the playground is the direct part. That the school as a whole was strengthened is the indirect part.