Happy Friday, everyone.
Consider three simple vignettes: three mornings of three students in three Guidepost classrooms.
1. Alex is 10 months old. He arrives at his Guidepost Nido classroom door in his mother’s arms. He stares intently at her face as she converses warmly with his classroom guide. The cadence and sounds of their conversation—which he is increasingly starting to parse as meaningful words, though their specific meaning is not understood—strike his mind as fascinating and musical.
He looks around the room. The class is open, clean, and familiar, with shelves and mirrors and stairs with railings and other such affordances. “Things to do”, he thinks, not in the form of words but latent motor impulses—to reach, to open and close, to stack, to climb, to eat and drink, to look—impulses formed from hundreds of hours of established practice in the room. It is the anticipation of the pleasure of doing.
Across the room, a younger infant lies on her back under a mobile. Alex looks down, and he sees two more children, a little bit older than him, sitting patiently on a bench, looking back up at him, in the middle of being helped out of their shoes. Alex loves his classmates, though, again, he doesn’t know it in such terms. He knows that they are interesting, that they are like him: unpredictable, capable, delightful.
His mother passes him into the guide’s welcome arms. Alex welcomes her embrace; he is confident in her love and care. After a moment, he is placed down on the bench next to his classmates. He fidgets, but is fascinated, by them, who he imitates by sitting (relatively) still, and by his shoes, being carefully removed from his feet.
He is primed to work. The railings of the room call to him like sirens, promising that he can work on pulling himself up and cruising. He will, in fact, do this for a full 45 minutes straight, all the way until morning snack.
2. Brenna is 3 years old. She arrives, with her father at her side, at her Guidepost Children’s House classroom door. Brenna takes off her coat before entering, and she deliberately finds the loop by which to hang it—just like she learned how, with simple, repeated, precise presentations weeks ago—carefully placing it on the hook. No one rushes her. Satisfied, the expectations of her sense of order running quite on track, she reaches up and opens the door.
Her guide comes and lowers herself to greet her. “Good morning, Brenna,” she almost whispers. Brenna smiles. “I have some cloths in the clean laundry basket for you to fold and put in the cabinet.” Brenna doesn’t reply at first. She looks past her guide, into the room. There is the hush-quiet bustle of a morning routine. A child younger than her, barely more than a toddler, is in the middle of arranging flowers, step by step, from a larger vase into smaller ones. An older child is watering plants. Another guide is still taking down chairs, and another student is helping her place them carefully, precisely, without noisily screeching them against the floor.
Having visually registered eager, global participation in the routines, Brenna mentally returns to the conversation with her guide. “Okay!” She turns back to hug goodbye the leg of her father, who has also been taking in the scene, before she crosses the room to her cloth work. She walks over to a basket full of clean but unsorted linens, and moves it next to the cloth cabinet, which she opens. She starts taking linens from the basket, going through the steps of folding them on a table, and placing them each carefully on the one of over a dozen stacks in the cabinet that matches its color and pattern.
For Brenna, it is simple, satisfying work. She feels a current of belonging—belonging in the room, both the space and the separate but common activities of the space. The room is her world and she is rightly working in it; she checks her own work; she folds and stacks cloths one by one. By the time she closes the cabinet and looks around, there are a dozen more children in the classroom, all working. Brenna walks over to a guide giving a boy a presentation on coffee grinding. She watches; she enjoys observing a presentation she has already mastered.
After a few moments, she makes her way over the shelf with the sewing materials, the happy, effortful momentum of her morning continuing at pace.
3. Chase is 10 years old. He confidently enters his elementary classroom while his parents are still greeting the Head of School at the front desk. It’s Thursday, which he knows, and he already has a plan. The room is full of dozens of shelves of curricular materials and books, enough for years of study. Students are getting themselves sorted, many are already working at tables, some in pairs and threes, and a quiet chatter fills the air.
“Good morning, Chase”, his guide says, as Chase walks by him and retrieves his work journal. “What are you working on this morning?” The question has the slightly sing-song lilt of a commonly repeated refrain, which it is: the guide asks the question every morning to every student, one by one, as they come in, and they know that the start of their day is to offer an answer.
“My Byzantium timeline,” he replies. He looks over his weekly plan, in his own neat handwriting, rewritten every Monday. “I’m way ahead in my sentence diagramming and equations. I’m actually done for the week. So I can work on my Eastern Empire project all day.”
His guide looks over his shoulder, following along in his notes. “Wow, okay. Have Devon and Erica double check your sentence diagrams before the end of the tomorrow. And you’ll join for anatomy presentations in the afternoon, right?”
“Oh, right. So Byzantium all the way until anatomy,” Chase says, already getting out a pile of notes, maps, books, and a large roll of paper. He plugs in his laptop. He has just started a unit on the Dark Ages of Western Europe, but what he really wants to know—and what he experiences the anticipatory pleasure of is that knowing, of connecting his reasoning mind more bits of the universe it so desires to understand—is how the Roman Empire persisted in the East. He had planned his week such that he could work on a project of his own, starting now, this very morning.
Each of these vignettes represents a good morning. A good start of the school day. More specifically, a good drop-off, for the parent and the student, and a good transition to the work period for the student.
In each classroom, everything is keyed to accomplish one task: to get the students immediately connected to great work.
The environment is prepared: it is clean, organized such that affordances for working—from an infant’s gross motor furniture to a research library adequate for a preteen—are visible and enticing. The students might not notice the phenomenon of preparation, per se, but they certainly notice what it affords. It calls to them and they go to it.
The routines are prepared. The way the guide greets each student and interpolates them into the classroom is meant to activate a mindset of choosing work or even to suggest a specific work. Each guide is active in ensuring that this happens first thing, for each student, with direction, presentations, and above all planning.
The emergent culture is reinforcing. A classroom of normalized students adds to the guide’s presentations and direction, and to the environmental design, an additional, powerful layer of social valorization of work.
A good morning is crucial. It is harder—not impossible, but distinctly more difficult—to get a student or a classroom into a good work flow later, if something else sets in before work.
A good morning is also a sacred gift. It is a component of the ideal student experience, of that rarity that is an actually great education. “We think the child is happiest when he is playing”, Montessori wrote, “but the truth is that the child is happiest when he is working.”
The most fundamental distinction of a Guidepost classroom is the realization of this truth, child by child, during the morning work period. We offer students many things, but the core thing is: a few hours of connection with reality, of elevation through work, consistently, every morning, so that each student can repeatedly bake into their developing souls the capacities for concentration, intentionality, purpose, and valuing. A good morning is everything.
The quality of the morning drop-off is also, not incidentally, critical for the parent’s experience. Depending on the parent and the day, drop-off might last anywhere from 20 seconds to a few minutes. A parent’s entire direct experience of the morning work period—again, the most pedagogically and developmentally important part of their child’s school day—will be formed over those handful of tens of seconds.
This is part of the routine, and it should also be kept top of mind. Does the parent see their child start to transition to work, or does that take too long? Does the parent see how the guide interfaces with their child? Does the parent see enough of a slice of the classroom to get an impression of a culture of work, even if it’s not fully, consciously grasped?
The presence of these things enables the parent to exit the school with a heart full of bouncing sparks gratitude, trust, and optimism. Substantive, positive morning experiences build a reservoir of good will and constitute the basis of a years-long relationship. Their absence, on the other hand, leads to indifference, passive disconnection, or, much worse, active anxiety.
A good morning is not a mere salutation, but a universally valued human experience, a good start to a day that is a day of a singular and irreplaceable human life.
We are good morning makers for our students and their parents. For our students, we are uniquely positioned to understand what a truly good morning looks like and to deliver it—both rarities in our culture. For our parents, we are uniquely empowered, at this one, short, specific time in the morning, to let them in, literally while they are in the space, on how lucky they are to be able to partner with us.
Have great weekends, and next week, make many good mornings.
Matt Bateman
Board of Directors, Higher Ground Education