Table of Contents Principals and Practices
Music for Social Emotional Development
The Line
To help a person or a group be well regulated, effective, creative, and fulfilled, there needs to be clear, sensible rules, boundaries, limitations, parameters.
If people don't know what the limits are, they get anxious and tend to keep testing to try to understand and make sense of what they can expect. I have seen many families, and classrooms that try to be nice and loose with limits, rules and expectations that ultimately show a lot of tension, frustration and anger.
A good metaphor here is a car that comes to a stop sign. A working engine should go into 'idle', conserve energy and 'wear and tear'. An engine that fails to idle, either overly engaging the breaks, or running stops signals, or avoiding routes where there are stop signals. The more students can learn to respect stop signals, and learn to idle, the freer they are to get around!
- Make expectations and limits clear, concrete, and explicit.
- Have clear and sensible consequences for crossing the line
- Acknowledge and celebrate when the line has been honored!
- Be sure the consequence for crossing a line is not actually a reward