Nobody sent respect an invitation. And that’s kind of the point.
Jemma Rust, one of our Expert Facilitators, shared something with me recently from Lockwood Primary School that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.
She’d been speaking with the principal, who mentioned almost in passing that she’d been on playground duty when a couple of kids had a falling out, worked through it together using a Problem-Solving Framework conversation, and then – this is the bit that I like most – just kept playing.
No adult hovered expectantly over them and no consequence was administered. There was also no restorative chat to be scheduled and no pastoral care lesson booked in for the following Tuesday. It was just two kids who’d somewhere along the way learned how to repair something small themselves, and got on with their afternoon like it was the most natural thing in the world – because for them, by then, it was.
The principal’s words to Jemma were: “It’s just becoming what we do here now.”
That sentence counts because I think it contains something that three decades of behaviour programs haven’t managed to produce and something that no laminated lanyard has ever once inspired in a child.
Respect gatecrashed Lockwood Primary – turned up unannounced, uninvited, made itself at home in an ordinary Tuesday lunchtime on an ordinary school playground – and the reason it could do that is because the culture of that school had been preparing for respect’s arrival for years.
Here’s what I’ve come to believe about genuine respect, having spent most of my professional life in and around schools trying to understand it. It almost never looks the way we designed it to look, and it almost never arrives on schedule. It shows up sideways, in moments that don’t make it into any school newsletter and don’t appear on any data dashboard. When a student seeks out the teacher they swore at last week, not because a consequence compelled them to, but because something in them simply needed to; when a Year 9 student quietly moves herself to a calmer part of the classroom because she’s worked out that something productive stirs in her when the noise drops; when two kids in a playground in regional Victoria have a disagreement, talk it through using language their school taught them… and keep playing.
None of those moments happened because somebody taught a child the dictionary definition of respect. They happened because the culture gave children enough genuine experience of being heard, held accountable with care, and welcomed back, that the behaviour eventually became their own.
That’s the mindset I’ve spent most of my career trying to describe and make practical, and it’s at the heart of what I’ve tried to do in The Truth About Student Behaviour.
This ain’t a new program or another values framework. But it is a simpler way of building the conditions where respect stops being something we beg children to demonstrate and starts gatecrashing the place on its own terms.
It’s at realschools.com.au/books/student-behaviour
Keep fighting that good fight,
P.S. The latest episode of Real Schools of Thought is well worth a listen. I sit down with Peter Bush, Principal of Kalianna School, to talk about what special schools can teach every school – from high expectations and the language we use, to predictable routines, relationships and looking beyond what kids can’t do to what they can.
Listen to What Special Schools Can Teach Every School here.
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