Great post by John Spencer on rituals and rules aimed at new teachers but applicable to all of us…

Education Rethink (John T. Spencer): A Sustainable Start : Rituals: “I don’t want to approach classroom rituals with the mentality of photo radar.  I don’t want students to slow down, speed up and change the way they act because they are afraid of who is watching.  I’ve learned that when I force students to fit into a system rather than creating a system that meets the needs of the students, the result will be confusion, anger and misbehavior.”

The best teacher I’ve had was Dan Goodman. He knew how to create classroom ritual.

Need proof? Go read his obituary Facebook wall (he would have yelled at us all for carrying on his memory within Facebook then laughed at the irony, btw).

Now go read the Wikipedia entry on Ritual.

I would add that I’ve had so much success with allowing my students to create a “culture” inside of our classroom that I think is positive, welcoming and often wholly absurd to outsiders (often parents, principals and students in other grades who are intrigued and want to know our secrets).

There’s a wealth of possibilities when your classroom has a palatable insider language that includes everyone in the classroom and allows the students the freedom to buy in to what we are hoping to achieve across the spectrum of the whole year.

I don’t mean insider language to indicate that there are students on the outside that aren’t included, but rather insider in the sense that there is something magical and mystical happening in our class that is tapping into the mysteries of knowledge (see Dead Poet’s Society).

For my classes, the squirrel has always been the totem animal of our set of rituals (I can’t tell you why, but it’s a good story… you’ll have to come to our class to find out). Needless to say, my home and classroom is filled with squirrels of all shapes, sizes and media that I’ve received over my five years of teaching. They each mean something and they indicate that a student bought in to our sacred act of learning and it meant something to them (and me). That squirrel ritual transcended into our classroom ethic and etiquette and conduction.

So, yes. Ritual is insanely important in a classroom and informs everything we might be aware or unaware of about the type of classroom experience we are helping to cultivate with our students. Your classroom has a culture and a set of implicit and explicit expectations, rules and rituals created by your students whether you choose to partake or not (you should).

As I move to a new school with a new set of students who don’t know about totem squirrels, I’m eager to see how my belief in the importance of ritual plays out. I’m guessing Maxwell will live on in his new abode and live on in the hearts of those who have gone on to the next grade.