Student Support at WSRF
WSRF is committed to providing an engaging environment for students to learn and grow into healthy and responsible citizens. We understand that for children to learn and grow in school they need a strong foundation of healthy neuro-sensory-motor systems including social and emotional health. When a student is having difficulties in one or more of these areas, their learning and perhaps the learning of their peers can be compromised.
We are committed to providing support for those students who are experiencing such challenges. This commitment is the foundation of the curriculum and the heart of our work. We have a Student Support Program which gives as much support as possible for students who are experiencing learning, social and/or behavioral issues.
Our Student Support Values:
Our task is to remove hindrances to learning. Children who experience learning and/or social emotional challenges present us with a riddle: What is the key that unlocks their capacities? As educators and parents our work is to seek these keys and support the child to find areas of success.
Empathy is key to success in life. We seek to build empathy in the children so that they can learn to stand in one another’s shoes.
A child who misbehaves is a disoriented child. If we realize that a child who is pushing the behavioral boundaries is disoriented, we approach the child less punitively than we do when we see their behaviors as intentionally naughty or disruptive.
Conflict is a necessary part of being human. If we expect that we can remove all conflict from children’s lives, we set ourselves up for frustration. Conflict is a given, and most of us have learned our greatest lessons from the conflicts we’ve experienced. Our task is to let children know that we are there, guiding them through their conflicts so that they may learn constructive lessons from them.
Support accountability rather than blame. When things go wrong, we set them right. Each person involved takes some of the responsibility.
We support our students with implicit approaches before moving to explicit approaches. Implicit means “not directly expressed.” In other words, it’s a process that is there, but the children are not necessarily aware of it. The Waldorf curriculum is rich in implicit approaches to social and emotional challenges. In fact, much of our support work is not apparent to the parent body or the students because it is implicit, embedded in the stories, artwork, speech, music, theatre, and rhythms of the lessons. When the teacher tells the class a story about a character who could never forgive and describes the hardships this caused him in his working life, this is an example of using a story to address the difficulties that one or more of her students is experiencing. On the other hand, an explicit approach directly addresses a situation in the class or with an individual child. Explicit approaches range from whole class strategies (“Children, is this a raising our hands and taking turns time or is it a speaking out time?”) to individualized ones, such as a behavior support plan.
WSRF Student Support Committees
Two-Pronged Program for Student Support
Our Student Support Program provides a two-pronged system of support – the Learning Care Group (LCG), which addresses students’ learning challenges, and the Social Literacy Care Group (SLCG), which addresses any social or behavioral challenges students experience. These two groups work hand in hand, with the Student Support Executive Group (SSEG) overseeing their work.
The Learning and Social Literacy Care Groups are responsible for:
Considering students’ needs with learning challenges or social/behavioral issues, respectively, and deciding the level of care they require to be healthy and safe at school. Each group follows the Response and Support Level process laid out in each group’s policy.
Providing strategies and strategies to help colleagues support these children.
Tracking students by documenting goals and outcomes; sharing this information with faculty and parents.
Initiating and facilitating support meetings and the preparation and follow up needed.
Supporting intake interviews and other evaluations through whatever level of involvement is needed.
Student Support Process for Social Emotional Issues
The student support process aims to move a student’s experience from challenge to resolution. Though we cannot resolve all difficulties to the satisfaction of all parties, we strive to address them promptly as they arise and to keep parents informed of our progress through the process. Here’s how it works:
Someone notices that a student has negatively impacted another student, a teacher, the classroom learning environment, or the social environment.
This someone can be a teacher, staff member, parent, or student.
The teacher uses the Social Literacy Response Levels according to age appropriateness and depending on the impact of the student’s actions.
Minimal Impact: If the student’s actions were disruptive and possibly inconsiderate but didn’t result in any significant harm to another student, teacher and/or the learning environment, the teacher engages in Response Level 1.
Moderate Impact: If the student’s actions caused significant disruption to the social environment, and resulted in identifiable harm to another student, teacher and/or the student’s own developmental progress, the teacher proceeds to Response Level 2. This action/behavior requires an Incident Report.
Serious Impact: If the student’s actions caused substantial harm to another student, teacher and/or the school, the teacher proceeds to Response Level 3. It requires an Incident Report, notification to a Social Literacy Care group member on the day the actions occurred. Automatic response is a Formal Restorative Conference with the student’s parents and a Social Literacy Care Group member. The student’s actions may result in immediate suspension and/or dismissal.
Detailed descriptions of the response process for each impact level are outlined in depth in the Student Support Handbook below.
Social Literacy Program at WSRF
The Importance of Social Literacy
Each of us over the course of our life has an overwhelming desire to make sense of the world and build healthy relationships with ourselves, our surroundings, and with other human beings. Waldorf education acknowledges that for us to “make sense” of the experiences that come towards us we need twelve senses not just five.
In the early years what we learn through our four lower senses of touch, life, proprioception, and balance helps us to understand how the world works and what part we play in it. These four lower senses inform our four higher senses. Our three highest senses of word, thought and ego are what we view as crucial components of social literacy as they guide us to make sense of others’ speech, recognize the meaning they wish to impart to us through their words, and lastly be able to experience the ego of another human being.
To bring these higher senses to healthy fruition in adulthood a child needs to develop five core competencies of social emotional learning:
Self-awareness – identify your own emotions, thoughts and values and understand how to guide your behavior
Self-management – regulate your own emotions, thoughts and behaviors in different situations and set to and work towards goals
Social awareness – be able to take someone else’s perspective and empathize with others
Relationship skills – communicate clearly, listen well, cooperate, resist inappropriate social pressure, negotiate conflicts well, seek and offer help
Responsible decision-making – make good choices about your behavior and social interactions based on ethics, safety and social norms
An Integrated Approach to Developing Social Literacy
At WSRF we know that an integrated approach over the course of a child’s school life is the key to building these competencies. Proactive, developmentally appropriate strategies above the horizon of the diagram below labeled “Light Touches,” are embedded in the Toddler Program to 8th grade to support our students’ social emotional learning.
Our students are not consciously aware of these light touches, which include music, painting, drawing, sculpting, speech, drama, storytelling, and movement, since they are built into our curriculum, woven into our everyday school life. All these activities as we know support our social emotional health. The arts provide opportunities to come to stillness, to explore one’s feelings and thoughts, and to collaborate and thus listen to others. Pedagogical stories tell of characters that experience struggles, and demonstrate what behaviors work and which don’t.
We design our class habits, rhythms and even our physical classrooms to keep social and sensory complexity at moderate arousal levels, with a high level of form and predictability. Our teachers intentionally lead the class with “loving firmness,” positivity, and a “we’re all learning” attitude. Each day is rich in beneficial movement and a rhythm that moves in and out of focused work. The children engage in meaningful chores which are meant to build their love for hard work and collaboration. Our goal is for these implicit approaches serve to diminish the need for the explicit interventions shown in the illustration on page 1 as “firmer holding.”
Grades 1-8 Social Literacy Program
In the elementary years we implement an explicit Social Literacy program to support our students in understanding and living into our school culture of respect, responsibility, and community. This whole class and whole student body approach supports our view that being responsible to the group is crucial for us to grow as human beings.
Our school agreements are the foundation upon which our program is implemented. We have a whole class component and two whole school components that guide our students to work together to build their five core competencies of social literacy.
