Heart-Centered Classroom

In my teacher education program at University of California, Irvine, I remember Joan Bissel teaching me about educational philosophies and the teacher's role in nurturing the growth of children. I remember Karen Nakai teaching me about unconditional positive regard for every student who would enter my classroom. I remember Carol Tipper teaching me the idea of "new day," giving students a chance for forgiveness and redemption, a fresh start each day. I remember Lois Hoshijo teaching me how to manage her middle school classroom in every detail from planning lessons to hanging student work on classroom walls. 

I remember my first interview at Hill Middle School in Novato, CA with Louise Koenig where I explained the importance of teaching to a whole child. I remember struggling as a first-year teacher choking back tears as Trudie Scott moved the desks of my first classroom from small groups to rows because my management ability didn't match my desire to teach using student-centered methods. 

I remember waking in the dark, almost every week, overcome with stress and anxiety that made my body empty completely, from both ends. I was sure that I was dying of an unknown plague, and when I went to see my doctor, she suggested that my condition was psychosomatic. The next time I woke up sweaty and panicking, I focused on my breath and calmed myself down. 

The core problem was that I didn't trust myself.

It took me a long time, many years, to realize that heart is what drew me to education in the first place. By heart, I mean the loving kindness that I felt from many of my teachers when I was a child, the care for individual worth that I read between the lines of the women who guided my teacher education experiences, the compassion I felt from the teachers who mentored me at the start of my career.

Here, in the present moment, twenty years into my career, I see how heart has shaped me as a teacher. I see how heart shapes my work and relationships with students. And I wish that twenty years ago someone had explicitly taught me about the power and importance of creating a heart-centered classroom. It took me twenty years to build a heart-centered practice, and I am just awakening to its importance for me and my students.

In the wake of several racial problems at my school that made national news, my principal organized a series of Study Circles in an attempt to create an action plan that would help us grow from courageous conversations about race. Facilitators led us through carefully designed explorations of identity and created a safe space to share our thoughts, fears, hopes, prejudices, and judgments. I shared my own story and listened to the personal stories of students, teachers, parents and administrators. The work was powerful and exhausting and transforming.

In one of the last sessions, we were charged to create action items to break down racial barriers to learning at our school. In my small group, we weren't making very much progress identifying barriers, so I turned the question around and asked students to talk about what teachers do to help them perform at a higher level in the classroom. 

One student, who had been openly sharing earlier, now sat quiet and pensive. I asked again, even pressed him a bit to speak out, and he looked me directly in the eyes and said, "I do my best work for my English teacher because I know she loves me." It was not lost on me that this beautiful, Black boy had just professed his need to be loved to an old white dude who just came out to the group in an earlier session.

This is the first time I have ever heard anyone, let alone a high school student,  articulate the need to feel love from his teachers as a foundation for learning. In practice we address many of Maslow's hierarchy of needs: physiological and safety needs, esteem, self-actualization; we rarely mention belonging as a need in substantive ways, and we never talk about love.

We are at a point in the evolution of our education system that we must begin to address love and belonging as needs. It's not that provisioning, instructional design, clarity moves, and student-centered instruction are no longer important. We teachers need to create heart-centered classrooms with an expanded awareness and energy that contains our students, our methods, our content. Most importantly, we need to skillfully and purposefully care for ourselves in the mindful field of compassion.

When I returned to my classes after two days at the Study Circle, students wanted to know what happened. I had been planning to talk to them after I had caught up with the my instruction calendar, but decided to make time and share what I had learned. I shared that the goal of the Study Circle was to improve our school by finding ways to break down barriers to instruction for all students, but for students of color in particular. I told them what changed me the most was the conversation about love. And then, I told each class, from the heart and through misty eyes, "I love each of you, and I hope that if I haven't told you already, that you know I love you from my actions in the classroom." Mine weren't the only moist eyes, and students were rapt, drinking in the love with abandon.

In one class a senior boy told me, "Mr. Southworth, back in the second week of school, when I was just getting to know you, I knew you loved me by the way you handed me a sheet of graph paper." This was another moment when I realized that my desire to create a classroom culture of kindness, compassion, and care had evolved to an unconscious competence. I am grateful for the grace that inhabits my actions an instills in students a feeling of love and belonging.

At the same time, I am looking for something that is a conscious competence by mindfully considering the needs of myself and my students in each moment. The idea of a heart-centered classroom is a reaction to teacher- and student-centered ideas of instruction and management that drain our energy reserves in an effort to control the necessary, natural chaos that characterizes authentic classroom experiences. The goal is to recognize and redirect the flow of energy that we teachers are already expressing in ways that nurture ourselves and sustain our teaching practice. My hope is that by reflecting on stories of heart that arise from my experiences in the classroom, I can deepen my practice and uncover a path.