WWAHHED?
Pronounced “Whahead.”
Meaning
What would a healthy holding environment do?
A healthy holding environment:
A safe place for people to grow and develop.
Safe meaning having solid, unbreachable walls within which caretakers are attentive, consistent, curious, and development-oriented. Safe meaning self-regulated and well-bounded. Safe meaning managed and monitored by confident, compassionate, respectful, nourishing — and nourished — adults. Safe meaning based in strong, healthy relationships. Safe meaning guided by grounded perspective, a sane relationship to reality, and wisdom.
What does an unhealthy holding environment look like in a school?
bullying
taunting and targeting
teachers calling out sick en masse
inadequate coverage for the teachers who are calling out sick
fear of students
siloed staff
student resistance to classwork
vandalism
fights in the halls
We can focus on students all we want. We can worry about students’ mental health and learning loss and addiction to social media and devolving behaviors.
Or we can ask, “Whahead?”
And the bottom line answer will always be this:
Tend to the teacher.
Support teachers in knowing how to respond constructively — through their relationships and through their instructional design — to their own emotions and their students’ behaviors, all of which are meaningful. Help teachers link arms to create strong boundaries and solid walls within which they can consistently offer the responses their students so clearly need. Care for teachers so they can, in turn, care for their students. Listen to teachers so they can make wise sense of their experiences, their emotions, their instincts. Teach teachers how relationships work so they can knowingly, actively tune them in their classrooms.
Unfortunately, focusing on students misses the boat. Because this focus ignores the fundamental message students are sending us adults:
“You are failing to hold us.”
You are failing at providing us with a safe environment within which to live, grow, and develop. It is YOU who need to pull yourselves together and figure out how to convince us that you are in charge, that we are safe in your charge, that you can hold us even when our shared reality is unnerving. We don’t need you to fix us. We need you to fix yourselves. We students need YOU to be okay so we can be, too.
Cuz if you can’t make this school a healthy holding environment, the most needy of us will take over. And show you precisely how it feels to be us.