“Every child has hidden potential. It’s easy to spot the ones who are already sparkling, but many students are uncut gems. When teachers stay with their students longer, they can see beyond the surface and recognize the brilliance beneath.” ~ Adam Grant, “What Most American Schools Do Wrong”, The New York Times, Oct 22, 2023
In his new book, Hidden Potential, Adam Grant provides a framework for how to help ourselves – and others – tap their personal “hidden” potential. I’ve been reading and listening to Adam Grant (in particular his Work/Life Podcast) for several years now. But long before I had heard of Adam Grant, I was a classroom teacher at Harrington Elementary, a public school in Denver, Colorado.
Harrington Elementary was a large school with 4 classes at every grade level with at least 24 students in each class. In the early 2000s, the principal and vice principal team at Harrington, Sally and Cindy, were a dynamic duo who dared to lead with kids’ learning at the heart of all their decision-making. We were one of several “year-round” public schools in Denver – rather than a 3-month summer, we had a 6-week summer and a one or two week break every eight to nine weeks. The purpose for the year-round schedule was to prevent the “summer slump,” a decline in kids’ academic skills and progress as a result of not having any instruction for an extended period of time.
“Looping” was another innovative design Sally and Cindy implemented at Harrington. Recognizing the importance of consistent relationships among students and their teachers/caregivers, teachers were always given the option to “loop” with their students from one grade level to the next. My first three years of teaching, I looped from 3rd to 4th to 5th with the same group of students. I completed a second cycle of looping from 3rd to 4th to 5th in the following three years. After six years at Harrington, I moved to California to take a 4th grade teaching position at Mount Madonna School, an independent school on the grounds of a yoga retreat center (Mount Madonna Center) in the Santa Cruz Mountains (but that’s a story for another time).
At Summers-Knoll, our multi-grade classrooms give teachers and students the consistency necessary for teachers to identify, recognize, and leverage students’ hidden potential. As Grant discusses in his October 22 NYTs piece, “With more time to get to know each student personally, teachers gain a deeper grasp of the kids’ strengths and challenges. The teachers have more opportunities to tailor their instructional and emotional support to help all the students in the class reach their potential. They’re able to identify growth not only in peaks reached, but also in obstacles overcome. The nuanced knowledge they acquire about each student isn’t lost in the handoff to the next year’s teacher.” Again, this idea is not new.
In The Challenge to Care in Schools, first published in 1992, Nell Noddings advocated for the same idea: “Children need continuity not only of place but also of people. […] Students and teachers need each other. Students need competent adults to care; teachers need students to respond to their caring (p. 68 – 69).” Early on in my teaching career, perhaps from my administrators Sally and Cindy, I learned the adage: kids don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. This theme of care and the importance of relationships in education keeps coming up.
One of the beauties of a small independent school, like SK, is our ability to prioritize relationships, because we know how much they matter, and ensure that our structures, policies, and practices support the building of genuine relationships – among teachers, students, parents, admin, and staff – with which we can truly care for one another as fellow humans on this journey of life.