Starting fresh for 2023 with Berry Street Education Model Strategies

A new year brings with it the start of a new school year, a hopeful and often challenging transition, particularly when schools are still recovering from the lingering effect of COVID-19 measures.

Educators have worked in extraordinary circumstances for the past three years and counting, some with staff vacancies that are hard to fill, principals acting as replacement teachers daily, and working towards academic results to make up the gaps in learning.

The team behind the Berry Street Education Model (BSEM), which focuses on bolstering trauma-informed and strengths-based classrooms, believes the start of the year is the best time to establish or tweak school routines, and set up yourself and your students for success.

It’s important to ensure staff are provided with the space to think proactively about their ways of working for 2023, to share and collaborate. It’s all about routines, routines, routines.

Getting Ready for 2023
Teachers need extra strategies in their toolkit to handle the ever changing and diverse challenges they face. After working with schools in the UK to implement BSEM in November, it’s clear the challenges we are seeing in Australian schools are also being experienced overseas.

London schools are already a third of the way into their school year, and teachers and principals there still seeing the impact of COVID-19 in the classroom a few months into their first continuously in-person school year, as gaps in student learning and wellbeing emerge.

There was a huge appetite for strategies on how to support the whole school community as it readjusts back to classroom-based learning, with many teachers aware that students need extra support following years of disrupted learning.

The advice we give at Berry Street is all about embedding our strategies into routines.

This helps students feel physical and emotional safety and know they can predict what comes next, especially on days when they might feel uncertain. Overwhelmingly, our UK schools felt more equipped to handle moments of escalation, and reported fewer escalations when using the Berry Street approach.

Making changes can be daunting when there already is so much to organise, so we have compiled some of the most effective tools teachers and principals can employ as they reset for the new school year.

How to Set Up Your Routines
At our own Berry Street School, we have established routines in place that happen every morning:

• Greeting students at entry.
• Checking in with students on how their morning is going and if they are ready to learn.
• Completing pre-determined self-regulatory strategies and physical movement before the student joins the group for morning breakfast routines.
• Running a morning circle routine which builds our classroom community, encourages student voice and participation, and enhances the students’ readiness to learn.
• Moving onward to transition for the first learning period.

These routines (which can take just 10 minutes) work for our school, and each school community will need to find the individual routines that work for their staff and students.

When thinking about what actions you could implement, consider:

• What deliberate routines would work in the micro-moments as your students enter their classroom.
• Introducing yourself and any new classroom groups.
• Explaining the day’s agenda through deliberate steps.
• Ensuring your lesson plan itself follows a sequence the student can predict. We encourage lessons to be planned in structures of 5- to 10-minute chunks of activity, even for secondary students.
• Giving your students clear strategies they can take up when they feel they are losing focus or feeling themselves escalate. We call this a Ready to Learn Plan and every student has one, not just those who are struggling.
• Providing sensory tools or listening stations inside the classroom when students need a short break, or allowing time outside with a trusted staff member.
• Incorporating movement breaks at the beginning of the year because students need to build up stamina for listening and learning after a long summer holiday.

Being clear on your routines right from the outset will establish strong relationships that underpin your classroom community for the year ahead, ensuring both teachers and students thrive through the year.

The Student’s Role in Routine
Students returning to classrooms after a long break are likely to be restless and may struggle to focus after weeks of free time and the ability to manage their own screens during the summer.

Berry Street encourages teachers to empower students to monitor themselves, communicate and negotiate when they need a short break from learning to renew their focus. But this only works when the teacher and student agree on what works well for all involved.

Other things to remember are that students usually want to do well but their bodies may have difficulty following their own intention.

Movement is key. Students need to move their bodies while learning, particularly at the start of the year. Stamina for learning is built up and won’t come without incremental practice. You can build up one minute at a time and track success in visible ways by setting bite-sized goals for on-task stamina.

Consider brain breaks, a short movement break that renews their focus on learning.

Supporting Teachers to Succeed
Faced with the monumental task of a new year, new class, and possibly new routines, teachers will need someone to lean on for wellbeing support. Every teacher should have a peer-teacher to buddy up with, share classroom observations and receive support.

New teachers will need multiple opportunities to learn from and be coached by experienced teachers. It’s important for them to be reminded their own wellbeing is linked to students’ wellbeing in the classroom.

This doesn’t mean pretending they are invincible. Teachers can model resilience and how to respond to speedbumps when learning, minor and major moments of escalation, and what to say when they occur.

In fact, we go further at Berry Street to suggest every teacher has their own Ready to Learn Plan, just like the students, and to model it in front of them. Examples could be addressing the frustration in the room and taking a few minutes to centre themselves and reminding everyone to take a deep breath.

Why is it Important?
A quarter of teachers say the cause of burnout is the inability to successfully manage disruptive student behaviour. It’s one of the reasons 60 per cent of teachers say they want to leave the classroom.

Students can struggle to successfully manage their own behaviour when every teacher across their day is taking a different approach. This is why every school, and everyone in the school community, benefits from a commitment to shared routines and strategies.  When everyone demonstrates buy-in, benefits are delivered across the board.  The first sign of success usually comes in the form of improved behaviour, with less disciplinary action required, and every day efforts to learn visible in students and teachers.

Ahead of the 2023 school year, our final piece of advice for all schools is to use this valuable reset time to talk about how wellbeing and learning are an integrated pursuit. And routines are the first port-of-call for effective schools to establish values and strategies to become ready to learn. Once the foundations are there, they will set you on a path to resilience and build upon the strengths in your school.

Image by BOOM