Rabbi Y.Y Jacobson often quotes the research in parenting that shows the critical importance of applying the “Four S’s” in our daily interactions with our children – children must feel: Safe, Secure, Seen and Soothed.

I think this research applies to teaching students of all ages- from the youngest through the oldest grades.

In my 25 years of teaching middle school through high school and now mentoring teachers who are teaching all grade levels- I think this paradigm can be applied in the following way-

Students need to feel Safe, Secure, Seen and Soothed in order to learn.

How does this look in practical terms? Today I’ll just tackle what “safety” looks like in a classroom –

At the beginning of every academic year I aim to drill down on establishing classroom culture. For example, I spend a lot of time discussing with my students what effective peer feedback looks, sounds, and feels like. It’s like breaking apart the routines and rhythms of the classroom into its simplest and most digestible parts. The meta goal – to create safety. When we know what’s allowed and what’s not allowed, the students and teachers feel safe. Students can’t learn if they don’t feel safe and secure. Teachers can’t teach if they don’t have a basic structure of systems and routines. When students feel safe, the learning can sky rocket. If students feel unsafe because they don’t know what to expect- chaos will ensue and no meaningful learning can happen.

Last week I mentioned that I believe that the psychological concept of the 4 S’s can be applied to education. The “Four S’s” are that our children must feel: Safe, Secure, Seen and Soothed. In my last post I discussed how to create safety in the classroom through structure, routines and predictable rhythms. How do we enable our students to feel secure? By designing a curriculum that meets the needs of all the learners in the classroom. About 10 years ago I taught a 9th-10th grade tanach (bible) class of girls where I met the needs of almost no one. The students kept complaining and I finally gave out a survey. What emerged was fascinating – 50% of the students felt I was going too slowly, and the other 50% thought I was moving too quickly. And then there was one outlier – she is a brilliant young woman who recently graduated from an Ivy League college and she confided in me that she needed the class to move at double the pace in order to feel stimulated. I didn’t manage this challenge that well. No one felt a sense of security in the classroom. Not the kids who were understimulated, nor the kids who were overstimulated. And I certainly didn’t feel secure about not being able to manage this challenge. But the upside of this unpleasant experience is that it moved me to reflect deeply about how I could have managed the challenge better. And this experience became one of the formative experiences in my career that compelled me to search for a more effective way of teaching than the classical model. At first it was experimental and then it became intentional – to use the principles of Project Based Learning in the classroom. I will continue to outline what these principles are in my next post.

In this post I’d like to continue my reflections on how the “4 S’s” can be applied to education. In the previous posts, I talked about the importance of safety and security in the classroom. In this post I’d like to tackle the importance of children being “seen” at school. I was blessed to have been “seen” by many educators throughout my student career, but one educator particularly stands out. I was in “my gap year” in Israel studying under one of the finest female Jewish seminary educators at the time. He was

such a brilliant man and an incredible  educator. I took 3 classes with him. But the problem was that his Gemara class was killing me.

I remember the discomfort and the pressure I felt every time he called my name in class. I so badly wanted not to disappoint him or to let him down. He always called on me. It was as if he was structuring class around my confusion and frustration with the Gemara we were learning. After about 2 weeks of experiencing these feelings I decided that I had to quit taking his class. It was just too much pressure. I was still in 2 of his other classes so why bother driving myself crazy and risk disappointing him???

A few days after I dropped his Gemara class he made a point of finding me in the hallway and calling me over. It was sooo awkward. Was he mad at me? Was he taking it personally?

Why did he have to keep noticing me?

He told me that I had a special knack for realizing when there were problems in the Gemara. He told me that sometimes recognizing the problems in life are more important than being the first to understand the solution.

He urged me to come back to class because it would be a waste of my potential if I didn’t give the class another shot.

I came back to class. Rav Binyamin Tabory zt”l proceeded to have a huge impact on my religious development. Over the course of my year in Israel he made me feel incredibly SEEN. One of the profound learning experiences I gained from him was how to make a student feel seen. He showed me that it wasn’t enough to recognise when I was struggling, but more importantly- he made me believe in myself that – with his support- I could succeed in his class.

This experience taught me so much about the power of an educator to mold a child’s self esteem ( not to mention spiritual and mental achievements) and it’s one of the formative educational experiences that shaped how I thought about my role as an educator. יהי זכרו ברוך. I pray that I too can emulate “Seeing” my students as well as he “saw” me.

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