WHOLE-CHILD DESIGN

Quality of Interactions

Interactions between adults and students may be unpredictable or inconsistent – students may experience some warm and positive interactions, but also escalating and negative interactions, often related to perceptions of noncompliance or disrespect (e.g., adult yelling, sarcasm, shaming, excessive scolding).

Adult interactions with students are often one-directional and directive or transactional in nature (e.g., directions, demands, statements).

A lack of schoolwide consensus on the prioritization of relationships results in limited time and opportunities to engage in relationship building, or to reflect on the state of relationships being built.

Personalized Understandings and Reflections

Adults engage most students in surface-level conversation, such as asking about their weekend or about their progress on an academic task.

Students are expected to focus solely on the academic tasks of school and “check other things at the door” (e.g., they are prompted to put aside a difficult situation at home and focus on a classroom assignment).

Broad assumptions about students or the school community may be present, as there are rarely opportunities for adults to identify and confront biases that they may hold about students, families, or the community.

Choice and Voice

Students may be offered minimal or low-stakes choices that involve limited responsibility (e.g., writing in pencil or pen, or the choice of an independent reading book). When choices are offered, they are highly constrained by the teacher.

Student voice is often limited to academic discussion, in settings and activities that are highly controlled by adults. Adult voice is dominant throughout classroom experiences.

Supporting Growth

Adults work to support growth for the class as a whole, but they cater to the “average” student, rather than providing effective individualized supports. Adults may feel unprepared to meet the diverse and varying needs of individual students, and due to limited opportunities for introspection, they may respond differently to students based on biases and assumptions about their identities.

In an attempt to be supportive, adults may either significantly over- or under-pitch and scaffold tasks, limiting student growth. This might look like adults retaining too much control in their teaching and interactions with students, removing the increased challenge, complexity and autonomy in tasks necessary for independent mastery of skills. Alternatively, unrealistic demands, with too little support, result in student frustration, disengagement, or failure to complete given tasks.

Quality of Interactions

Adult interactions with most students are consistently characterized as warm, encouraging and authentic. However, there is also a predictable subset of students who frequently experience negative interactions with adults.

Attempts are made to improve negative adult-student interactions, with limited success. This may be because the root cause of the poor relationship is not understood, the intervention is based on assimilation to white, patriarchal, or other dominant group norms, and/or student input is limited.

Across the school, adults vary in their commitment to developing relationships, especially in times of difficulty and challenge.

Personalized Understandings and Reflections

Students have some opportunities to talk about their personal lives and interests during specified blocks of time during the day, particularly in “non-academic” time (e.g., Class Meeting or snack time). However, students rarely have opportunities to discuss or express ideas about complex topics, such as their identity, culture, or the impact of current social or political events on their lives.

Adults may create some additional ways to get to know students better (e.g., through goal setting, a student spotlight, etc.), but this knowledge is not consistently used to inform future interactions, classroom structures and norms, or instructional content.

Choice and Voice

Some meaningful choices are offered to students to increase agency and responsibility (e.g., a choice of how to publish each writing piece, or the topic of a research project). These choices may be limited by either not continuing to expand over time, or by being so open-ended and complex that students are not able to make a choice successfully. For example, a teacher might ask the class to make a group decision about a project, without sufficient support for communication skills or guidance on an effective decision-making structure.

There are some opportunities for student voice in times of convenience (e.g., when prompted by the teacher, when a lesson is going well), but not always in times of student need (e.g., when a peer conflict arises during a transition).

Supporting Growth

Adults provide some tailored experiences for students to help maximize their growth (e.g., some differentiated materials, utilizing small groups and personalized check-ins). However, students typically only experience individualized supports after demonstrating an intense and persistent need, and these supports are provided by a specialized teacher (e.g., a counselor, speech therapist).

Adult expectations may still be somewhat low, especially regarding struggling students; this results in adults doing a lot of the “heavy lifting” and not always providing adequate challenge.