By: Chris Erickson, Head of School at Peregrine School
How do we create a classroom or school that is genuinely defined by children’s needs? Why are parents and teachers sometimes advised to create “behavior management systems” that take a mistrustful stance toward children? If caregivers take a mistrustful stance toward children, can they learn to trust themselves? Ho do our own histories impact relationships with the children we care for?
These are some of the questions posed at a recent Peregrine School teacher workshop on the topic of attachment theory in the classroom, but I think you’ll find our workshop is totally translatable to parenting.
Our workshop centered around the book Learning to Trust: Attachment Theory and Classroom Management by Marilyn Watson. In the book, Watson follows a second/third grade teacher for two years in a high poverty school in Louisville, Kentucky, as she manages the class guided by attachment theory.
The book opens by outlining some of the more traditional views of children’s behavior and learning:
● Children are passive in their own development, but biologically programmed to seek pleasure and avoid pain
● Caregivers must socialize children through judicious dispensing of rewards and punishments
● Through rewards and punishment, children learn to adopt behaviors that caregivers believe to be useful and right
This is traditional education’s predominant theory in shaping approaches to socialization and classroom management – and perhaps describes many of our own school experiences and how our teachers viewed us as children.
This view of learning is known as behavioral learning theory (and, yeah, it’s the mistrustful one). The theory states that due to the lack of innate motivation to learn without rewards and punishments, children will not progress and develop.
On the other hand, according to Watson, attachment theory holds that:
● Children are socially oriented and naturally active participants in their own learning
● Gradually through the years in the presence of sensitive care from adults, children develop self-reliance, the capacity for emotional regulation, and social and academic competence; these qualities are innate within the child
● Aggressive, defiant, or “lazy” behaviors do not indicate “a bad seed” or an attempt to “manipulate” but are an expression of real emotional needs that must be heard and addressed
This is where the title of the book perfectly encapsulates our philosophy at Peregrine, a truly progressive school: We have learned to trust the latter view as to what a person is and how they develop.
We as parents, teachers, and staff, (as well as the students themselves), have to embrace a more optimistic view of human nature: A human being is naturally social and is a learning machine: We want to learn, want to form nurturing relationships, want to be competent and productive.
If a person – child or adult – doesn’t seem able to do these things, it’s because learnable skills are lacking; it’s not that they haven’t been rewarded and punished enough.
Learning to identify, express, and appropriately meet one’s emotional needs, personally and within a group, is a lifelong pursuit. The pursuit is complex, particularly for those of us with complicated attachment histories – and this is where our workshop got interesting! Rather than focusing primarily on how our students’ attachment history impacts their behavior, we turned the focus on ourselves as caregivers.
You may already be familiar with the four attachment styles developed in the 1950s by British psychologist John Bowlby: secure, ambivalent (or anxious), avoidant, and disorganized. These “styles” arise from the process of a caretaker engaging with the child to meet their needs, and to support the development of the necessary skills for the child to live a successful life. Children develop skills this way, but also acquire beliefs about themselves and others that can follow them into adulthood.
Children’s histories of attachment relationships are not the only attachment relationships likely to affect our classroom teaching. All of us were infants once and although a lot of us were lucky enough to have had a history of secure attachment with our caregivers, many of us did not.
Several researchers have described situations in which teachers interacted with their students in unsupportive, even angry ways, and many of these teachers were found to have had a history of insecure attachment themselves (Watson, pp. 34).
Learning to Trust cites some recent research on teachers’ attachment styles and classroom teaching, which we shared at our workshop:
● “In a 2016 study of teachers in an infant-toddler day care, teachers with greater attachment anxiety reported more conflicts with children, which in turn related to more aggressive, defiant, or destructive behavior and
dysregulation in the children.” (Watson, pp. 36)
● “Teachers with insecure anxious or avoidant attachment styles were significantly less likely to choose collaborative, working with, or win-win approaches to classroom management. That is, they were less likely to engage with students to solve problems or to compromise with students in conflict situations.” (Watson, pp. 36)
It’s easy to see how these studies translate directly to parenting! We all have strengths and weaknesses as parents, and attachment theory reminds us that these likely stem from our own histories – for better or for worse. Reflecting on our own histories can help us to begin the process of picking up the skills we lack – just like the kids do! Yes, progressive education fully embraces the concept of lifelong learning, and thus we definitely believe you can teach old (or maturing!) dogs new tricks!
At our teacher workshop, I was truly heartened by our teachers’ willingness to share their reflections on these ideas and their own attachment histories and how it impacts their relationships with their students and their craft of teaching. These ideas epitomize the foundation of why Peregrine School exists.
Yes, at Peregrine we S.O.A.R. with Science, Outdoor Education, Arts, and Responsibility. Peregrine is hands-on, play-based learning, collaborative projects, integrated & thematic curriculum, and positive guidance. We’re Reggio, low student-teacher ratios, no grades, no homework, lots of play and study time in the garden — these are essential, and what makes us us. And at its very heart, Peregrine is a human nature movement. We’re so glad the Davis community has embraced it for seventeen years!
