When I was a high school social studies teacher, we used to talk about pivotal versus important events. We’d start the year developing what we called our “personal pivotal events timelines” as a tool for applying vocabulary and skills as well as a tool for community-building. Last September, I added another pivotal event to my timeline: an ADHD diagnosis. While I had had a hunch for a while, the official diagnosis led to a deep reflection on my educational experience, the warning signs and missed opportunities, and how my coping mechanisms had influenced my approach to teaching. There are moments from my childhood—like mandatory use of calendars, forgotten permission slips, graded debates, and well-crafted procrastination—that help explain my visceral disdain for behavior-oriented punishment in my own classroom practices. I have now come to understand the ways traditional educational systems were not designed for brains wired like mine, nor many of my friends, students, and colleagues.
Habits of work remain a point of tension in my practice. On one end are culturally-responsive, equity-centered, and student-driven habits of work that help students develop the skills necessary to engage as citizens of the world. On the other end, habits of work that are used for compliance and control; they are habits of work that reinforce euro-centric ideas with ties from the eugenics movement. I have experienced the impact of both systems. As a student, I felt like I was constantly in trouble, but there were no opportunities to slow down, reflect, and learn alternatives to the strategies that weren’t working. As a teacher, I saw students of color disproportionately impacted by lower habits of work grades across their classes as they were labeled “loud” and “disruptive.”
Habits of Work as an Inequity Tool
I now work as a coach with schools and districts taking on the development, implementation, or revision of habits of work for their learners. Habits of work are often used as a cure-all for classroom management and control, when instead it could and should be used as a tool for building community and culture. At the Great Schools Partnership, we see habits of work as one tenet of an equitable grading system. The intent of separating out habits of work from academic proficiency is to work toward removing the implicit bias embedded in our grading system. The over-policing of Black students in particular has been widely documented and unchecked habits of work can be a slippery slope to reinforcing racist practices and contributing to bias in teachers’ perception of Black students’ potential.
One of the questions most often posed to me is, “How do I get students to do what I want if I can’t take off points for turning work in late, for arriving to class late, for talking to their friends in class, for using their phones when I don’t want them to, etc…?” When I’m asked this question, what I really hear is, “How do I control my learners?”
While habits of work can be a system for reducing inequitable outcomes, if the habits of work are not culturally responsive, accessible, or asset-based, there is a great risk that they may actually increase the inequities in the grading system. As Dr. Gholdy Muhammad writes, “Equity as access only, without addressing structural oppression/racism, isn’t equity in its fullness” (Unearthing Joy, pg. 33).
Habits of Work as an Equity Tool
I see three key elements to developing and implementing meaningful and effective habits of work: time, clarity, and relationships. By taking into consideration these three elements, habits of work can be a foundational tool for individual and collective learning and growth.
1. Time: We must be explicit and intentional that habits of work matter by holding time in our school or district policies, bell schedules, and articulated curriculum to practice and get feedback on habits of work.
In the fall of 2018, my colleague—the school’s literacy coach—and I set out to develop a year-long pilot to separate out student’s habits of work from their academic grades. Our ongoing research on authentic proficiency-based teaching led us to the conclusion that classroom behaviors should not influence feedback on assessments and academic proficiency. Habits of work became an opportunity to explicitly teach and give feedback on elements of executive functioning skills for the incoming ninth graders in my heterogeneous world history course. We identified the skills that were most essential to success: time management, inquiry, organization, and self-advocacy.
To start the year, we designed our first two units to focus on time management and note-taking. The time management strategies we introduced throughout the two units were:
- Sticky-note goals: Students identified two goals they had for themselves during the class period. We would start the class with the goals and end the class reflecting on how they worked toward those goals. Was their goal too complicated? Was their goal too easy? Did the goal help them work towards the tasks for the day? What would they need to focus on for the next class?
- Chunking tasks: Students were offered Google Keep or sticky notes to identify their task for the day and created 2-4 sub-bullets breaking apart the steps it would take to complete the task.
Timers: Students were offered various ways to manage time—Pomodoro timer, listening to 5 songs and taking a break, or setting “phone breaks” twice during the class block as a collective break for everyone.
The note-taking strategies we shared with students (through direct instruction and practice) were:
Despite having an average class size of 25+ students, we built in conferencing time throughout the two units. By the end of the first quarter, each student had conferenced with me at least three times. During the conferences, I asked students to share the strategies they had tried, whether they loved or hated them (ninth graders notoriously fall into one or the other, rarely “liking” a strategy), and what they wanted to keep working on. Then I offered specific feedback on a suggested starting place.
By the end of the first quarter, the students were able to learn more and develop their skills faster than what I had experienced in prior years. I also knew my students better, allowing me to personalize the instruction and curriculum to better reflect their interests and to build in interventions and supports for the wide array of learners. Most significantly, classroom management felt like a breeze, as students reported feeling like they were respected by their peers and by the adults in the room, knew what was expected of them, and understood the resources available to them when they were having a difficult day. Below are just a few reflections from students after the first quarter:
- “Some things that I would like to improve on for the next quarter is being more involved in class. I feel like I participate, but not as much as I would like to be. I am going to try to speak up more and get more involved in the conversation.”
- “I would like to improve on my time management skills, at times while doing the notes I felt that I was behind, a lot of other people were almost done.”
- “Asking for help since I didn’t need to last quarter but I might have to this quarter.”
The following school year, the focus on habits of work as a tool for feedback and reflection became a lifeline. When the pandemic hit in March of 2020, my students were better able to cope because they already had practiced the essential executive functioning skills necessary for remote learning: creative problem solving, independent work, and how to ask for help. While the time spent explicitly on instructing toward the habits of work felt significant at first, slowing down created much more expansive benefits during the rest of the year.
2. Clarity: We must be explicit with the skills we want our students to develop and remove the impact of cultural biases.
In most examples of habits of work, the real-world skills determined to be essential for success in the college and careers pathway include timeliness, classroom participation, respect, and growth mindset. Not only are many of these skills complex, but they also shift depending on who defines the terms and evidence of success.
Let’s use timeliness as an example. Timeliness in school is often considered showing up to school or class on time and turning in work on time. I taught primarily ninth graders, who were mostly between the ages of 13-16. Until age 16, students cannot drive themselves to school (if they had the economic privilege to have a car available to drive), which means relying on older siblings, caregivers, bus drivers, biking (itself an economic and geographic privilege), or walking (a physical and geographic privilege). For the vast majority, they were relying on others’ timeliness skills (on top of unpredictable Vermont weather). I also think about the time blindness that is a symptom of ADHD, a personal struggle for me. Am I a less worthy colleague because the way my brain is wired makes adhering to strict timelines more difficult? Is it my fault that decades of underdiagnosis of women with ADHD (due to institutionalized sexism in medicine) may have resulted in my diagnosis being overlooked for many years? With all of these factors taken into consideration, is it really timeliness I am most concerned about as a teacher? Or do I really want students to have the awareness and knowledge to reach out for help or communicate a potential delay?
I wonder: If we were held to the same habits of work as some of our students, what would it look like? Pay being deducted from teachers’ paychecks for arriving late to school? For not submitting grades by the due date? When I am going to meet a friend for dinner, if they are late, am I more upset about their time management skills or grateful for the text informing me of the delay? What are the messages, implicit and explicit, we are telling our students about their worth to the world?
Dr. Carla Shalaby, researcher, teacher educator, and author of the must-read book, “Troublemakers: Lessons in Freedom from Young Children at School” (2017), reframes the typical list of important habits of work that covertly reinforces systems of control rather than individual and collective growth. In her most recent article titled, “Are We Teaching Care or Control?” she posits, “We know how to name objectives in our academic content areas and how to plan backwards to build the skills and understandings required to reach them. Educators can approach behavior management in the same way. Helping students learn how to be safe and thoughtful in a shared community requires explicit skill-building and alignment on some clear, shared values.”
| WE SAY THIS… | WHAT I’M HEARING IS… | WHAT IF WE SAID… | WHAT THIS REQUIRES*… |
|---|---|---|---|
| Classroom participation | Only the voices heard are voices valued. | Reflective learner | Students are provided clear learning expectations, receive feedback on their progress, and have multiple ways to demonstrate knowledge and understanding. |
| Respect | There is an unrealistic expectation that students know how to co-exist and structures for repairing harm are already in place. Who determines what respect looks like and sounds like? | Community of care | Students co-create community agreements to acknowledge how they want to show up for one another and understand the process for naming and repairing harm. |
| Timeliness | Being on time is more important than the human experience. | Proactive communication | Students learn when and how to communicate personal needs. Teachers identify clear and thoughtful boundaries. |
*Using an antiracist, universally designed lens can help identify many access points for learners
3. Relationships: We must know who students are and the cultures that shape their worldview in order to build a foundational relationship through which we can be responsive to who the student is, not who we want them to be.
At the beginning of the school year, I would ask my students to write me a letter introducing themselves to me before I met with special educators, school counselors, or caregivers. I wanted to hear from students first. Using this letter, I was able to glean the experiences that had impacted them— both positively and negatively. I was also able to note the types of learning activities, topics of study, and conferencing questions I needed to be intentional about throughout the year (to read more about how to take a trauma-informed approach to “Letters to Teachers”, please read Alex Shevrin Venet’s blog post, What I wish knew about ‘what I wish my teachers knew’). Most importantly, I could hear from the students about the ways they had been treated and the supports I needed to ensure were in place to work toward undoing any negative stories students told themselves.
With a better understanding of who my students were, what they needed, and some of the external factors impacting the ways they showed up at school (jobs, family responsibilities, extracurricular activities, learning differences), I was able to build trust with the students by honoring the stories they told me.
Before creating habits of work, it is essential to build a personal and collective understanding of why habits of work are needed and the role they serve. There needs to be a baseline understanding that every student is a valuable member of the community and has the capacity to learn and grow. Alex Shevrin Venet applies the term “unconditional positive regard” to the classroom as she names the need for teachers to start with a baseline belief that all students have value, are important members of the learning community, and have the potential to continue to learn and grow. Dr. Gholdy Muhammad writes about the impact deficit-thinking has on teachers’ perceptions of their students, and how relationships must first honor the genius in each other.
I often return to a student I had during my last year of teaching. The student, originally from a West African country and staying with a host family, was stuck in America due to the pandemic. The student was a few years older than the rest of their classmates due to their designation as a multilingual learner. In their letter to me at the start of the course, the student explained that they loved learning about history and that it takes them longer to read, to write, and to speak because they have to translate from English to French (just one of their native languages) and then back to English in order to communicate or complete any assignments. Throughout the first few weeks, I noticed the student’s phone was always out. One day, I asked the student about it and they showed me how they were using a translator to transcribe what their partner was saying into French so that they could still engage in the conversation. Had I not spent the time on the front end getting to know the student, the barriers they were working to overcome, and their goals in their learning, it would have been an easy opportunity to take the phone and deduct points from their community contribution habits of work grade. If I had required the student to keep their phone away, what would that say about how I saw them as a learner? What message would that send to their peers? Throughout the semester, this student built meaningful relationships with their peers—even teaching them about useful apps to help support their learning. In turn, their peers would ask how to best support this student’s access to the work at hand.
“Just as students need to have rich background for comprehension and problem solving, teachers need adequate background knowledge and usable information in order to know how to apply culturally responsive tools and strategies,” writes Zaretta Hammond in Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain (pg. 21). The greatest strength of a culturally responsive, equity-centered habits of work is its reminder that classrooms are based in reciprocity. Students are learning with and from their peers and their teachers. Teachers are learning with and from their peers and their students. For habits of work to support our students beyond their schooling experiences, we, as educators with tremendous power, must remind ourselves that the world is complex and nuanced so we need to be creating expectations that reflect that.