We Can’t Assume Students “Know It”
Dr. Allison Amodie 

One thing I keep coming back to at the beginning of this school year is this: we spend a lot of time teaching routines and expectations, but sometimes we forget that students also need to be taught the skills behind them.

We can tell a student to “make a better choice,” but have we taught them what that better choice actually looks like? Have we taught them what it looks like to calm down?

How do you disagree with someone appropriately? What do you do when you’re frustrated? How do you ask for help? Join a group? Handle losing? Accept feedback? Repair a situation after making a mistake?

Especially in elementary school, we can’t assume students already know how to do these things.

That has become an important part of how I think about leadership. If we believe schools are places of learning, then that learning has to extend beyond academics. Students are developing the skills they need to navigate relationships, challenges, mistakes, and conflict. Our job is to create the conditions where that development can happen.

At Silver Spring, our students know that Roadrunners R.I.S.E.: we are Respectful, Inclusive, Safe, and Engaged. But those words only mean something if we help students understand what they actually look and sound like throughout their day and if we, as adults, model those values ourselves.

To start this school year, we have placed a greater emphasis on explicitly teaching social/emotional and behavioral skills. We teach the skill, model it, practice it, talk about it, and then give students opportunities to use it in real situations. When students struggle, we return to teaching.

We would never introduce a new math skill once and expect every student to master it. Social/emotional and behavioral skills shouldn’t be any different.

There is an equity component to this work, too. When we assume students should already know how to behave, communicate, regulate emotions, or solve problems, we risk holding students accountable for skills they may never have been explicitly taught. Clear teaching and consistent support give every student access to the expectations we have established.

For school leaders, this means looking beyond individual behavior and examining our systems. Are expectations clear? Are adults responding consistently? Are we developing the capacity of our staff to teach and reinforce these skills? Are students being empowered to recognize what they need and make different choices over time?

Those questions reflect the kind of leadership at the heart of the EDL Vision of a Graduate. Learning, Equity, Development, Empowerment, and Support are not separate leadership practices. They intersect in the everyday decisions we make about how we build school culture and respond when students struggle.

Taking time to explicitly teach these skills isn’t taking away from academics. It helps create classrooms where students are ready to learn, work together, make mistakes, problem-solve, repair harm, and keep going.

Sometimes the best behavior intervention is the skill we took the time to teach before there was ever a problem.

We can’t assume students “know it.”