Live Your Excellence

Bring Your Best Self to School Every Day

Jimmy Casas

• Publisher: Dave Burgess Consulting, Inc.
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781951600099
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Administration

Jimmy Casas, veteran educator and author of Culturize, believes that by cultivating a mindset that centers on investing in students, colleagues, and—most of all—themselves, educators can shift schools away from a culture that runs on compliance, blame, and fear. In Live Your Excellence, he shares inspiration, stories, and strategies to help overcome the negative undercurrents that exist in school culture today.

Part I: A Culture of Investment

Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.

Rumi

One

The Compliance Trap

I still recall the day I jumped up on a cafeteria table out of frustration.

I had already caught myself using a harsh tone with students who walked away without cleaning up after themselves. I had grown tired and frustrated with students in the cafeteria during lunch. I am not exactly sure why, but on that day it became personal.

What exactly bothered me so much? Was it that I thought our students were being disrespectful to our custodians and kitchen staff or that they seemed so entitled that they thought it was somebody else’s job to clean up after them? Admittedly, I have always had a soft spot in my heart for the custodial staff who work in our schools, especially those who take a tremendous amount of pride in keeping our classrooms, hallways, bathrooms, and other areas clean. Maybe it’s because my father served as a school custodian, and so did I too. All I knew at that moment in the cafeteria was that what I was seeing had to stop.

Along with the assistant principals and cafeteria supervisors, I was set on getting these students to comply. We used the PA system to announce to students that they needed to clean up after themselves. We walked from table to table telling them to dispose of their trash. We kept an eye on students who we suspected were leaving trash on the tables. Nothing seemed to work.

Our conversations became harsh. My comments about our students also started to influence my colleagues in a negative way. I directed our school resource officer to monitor the cameras so we could identify the culprits and then gather them up and bring them back to the cafeteria where we assigned them clean-up duty as a consequence for not cleaning up after themselves. Desperate to try something different, we offered to let the students leave the cafeteria early—something they often requested—but only if they had cleaned up after themselves.

Looking back, I realize I had fallen into the compliance trap: my approach was not genuine. It was conditional. Everything I did was only to get the students to comply. I didn’t involve the students. I didn’t sit with them or ask questions to better understand their perspective or have meaningful conversations. I didn’t take the time to get to know them as kids—as the good kids they were. Instead, I barked orders, assigned seats, and took away privileges.

I wasn’t investing in the students. Rather than take the time to partner with them or give them a voice in resolving this concern, I found myself jumping up on a cafeteria table. Not only did I yell at hundreds of students for not cleaning up after themselves, but I grabbed a trash can and tossed garbage all over the cafeteria floor to prove my point: this is how they were treating our kitchen and custodial staff each time they expected them to clean up after them—like trash.

As I reflect back on that day, I am able to see where it all began to go wrong. I just missed it in the moment. I had approached this dilemma the only way I knew how at the time: by punishing those who weren’t following the rules.

I was reminded of this experience about a year ago when I came across this reflection by Tom Herner,

If a student doesn’t know how to read . . . we teach.

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If a student doesn’t know how to swim . . . we teach.

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If a student doesn’t know how to multiply . . . we teach.

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If a student doesn’t know how to behave . . . we punish?

This is exactly what I had done. I punished the students for their behavior. Making the kids spend a week cleaning up after everyone else did not teach them a lesson. Yelling at them didn’t help. It made them resent me, resent their teachers, resent adults and authority figures.

In the years since, I’ve seen and heard things like this over and over again in my travels around the country. Educators are doing the best they can with what they’re taught to believe is true: that punishing kids when they don’t follow the rules is what we are supposed to do. We often fall victim to believing that kids need to “understand that there are consequences for their behavior” because this is the way the “real world” works. When you don’t follow the rules you will be punished, and eventually you will learn not to make the same mistake again.

This mentality hurts not only our kids but also the educators who work in schools. We end up creating a gotcha culture rather than an I’ve-got-you culture. A culture of compliance.

But there’s a better way.

What we should be trying to do instead is to create cultures of investment where both the students and the staff are doing the right thing because in their hearts they believe it is the right thing to do—not because someone else insists they have to. We can begin to cultivate a healthier environment, where everyone in the organization carries themselves with a sense of pride and a commitment to being the best version of themselves.

How Cultures of Compliance Get Started

A school principal recently confided in me about his struggles to get his staff to comply to certain things he expected them to do. When I asked him to share an example of his experiences, he told me a story of how he was frustrated with his staff for failing to stand outside their classrooms and supervise the hallways during passing time on a daily basis. He had been clear and even asked nicely. Initially his staff complied, but over the span of a few weeks, he noticed less and less of them outside their classroom doors until eventually there was hardly anyone to be seen.

Frustrated, he sent out an email to the staff reminding everyone of his expectations and letting them know he would be monitoring them. The next day staff could be seen standing outside their doorways again. Unsurprisingly, he told me the impact of his intervention was temporary. His frustration grew more intense, and within a couple of weeks, he finally reached a breaking point when an altercation between two students took place in a busy hallway near several classrooms. Fortunately, no one was hurt, but the principal had had enough.

The next day at a faculty meeting he voiced his displeasure with his staff and told them that moving forward he would be monitoring the hallways even more closely. Any staff member who was not out supervising between classes would receive at minimum a written warning followed by a letter of reprimand for repeat violators.

Principals getting frustrated with staff. Teachers and bus drivers losing their cool with students. Over the course of my career I’ve learned that there are ways to minimize these encounters so that they don’t get out of control.

Authoritarian cultures are rooted in compliance. You see this in workplaces where a staff has learned to do what the boss tells them to do—or else! These same roots begin to dig their way into classrooms and wrap themselves around teachers who then begin to behave in a similar fashion, commanding kids about what to do and ready to offer up a detention or a written office referral for those who don’t comply.

Why Mindsets Matter

The first school I ever worked in was a magnet school for the arts for students in grades six through eight. It was located in downtown Milwaukee. It was still under construction the first day I walked in to work and came complete with an asphalt parking lot that also served as a makeshift playground. It didn’t take long for me to notice the bars over the exterior windows and the metal detectors when I entered the building.

I was given a tour of the building’s five levels: a basement and four floors. My classroom was located on the fourth floor, but I learned that it would not be ready for the start of school so my room was relocated down the hallway in a small auditorium. Rows of desks had been situated on the stage, and a temporary blackboard on wheels had been provided. To say I was disappointed was an understatement.

Further impacting my mood and attitude was the nonclassroom duty that had been assigned to me—cafeteria hallway supervision. Besides my under-construction classroom and the auditorium, the fourth floor also housed the cafeteria. That meant that every student in the building headed up there for lunch. For sixty minutes every day, I was responsible for supervising the hallways and helping keep order for 650 middle schoolers, most of whom I did not know and, truthfully, did not want to know.

I can tell you I did not embrace my new role in a positive way. In my mind, it was enough for me to be responsible for my own students, and I didn’t understand why I was forced to “babysit” kids who regularly snuck out of lunch and roamed the hallways, causing issues and disrupting classes. I saw it as an extra responsibility and—quite frankly—a burden. Rather than embrace my role and try to interact with students, I glared at kids who stepped outside the rules. I barked orders, yelled, wrote referrals, and, on a few occasions, even chased a few students who were trying to escape down the stairs. To say I was miserable is putting it mildly.

At the time I thought I was doing what I had been asked to do: keep order in the halls. I was focused on what many of my college instructors had told me during my coursework and what the teachers had shared with me during my student teaching. I was supposed to maintain order, be firm but fair, and demand respect from the students or they would walk all over me.

Flash forward four years later, and you might wonder what happened to this negative young teacher. I was fortunate to be influenced by some exceptional teachers and mentored by some passionate...