Dignity, Rigor, and Attachment: The VDA Faculty Motto

by Kyle Steele

Recently, a former student who had moved out of state was in town and visited the school for the day. Her mother told me, “She had a lot of great friends at this school, but the people she misses most are the teachers.” It’s a remarkable statement, but not that surprising to people who have spent a lot of time at VanDamme Academy. VDA is a place where students naturally want to achieve a lot and genuinely value the subjects being taught. Parents may naturally wonder where this special environment comes from. I was certain from my first day at VDA fifteen years ago what the cause was: the teachers.

There is a culture amongst the faculty that is perceptible to anyone who spends a significant amount of time with them. However, putting your finger on exactly what that difference is can be difficult since each VDA teacher has their own style and habits. After fifteen years, I think I’ve finally found the common virtues that are the wellspring of the excellence of VDA’s diverse faculty. Those virtues are: dignity, rigor, and attachment. These virtues are the key to what makes VDA classes naturally irresistible to students. The atmosphere these virtues create motivates students to achieve.

DIGNITY: EVERYTHING MATTERS

Andrew Lewis, one of the school’s co-founders, has a simple slogan that he told me when I was starting as a teacher, “Everything matters.” By this he meant that everything a teacher does matters to the success of his class. The way he dresses, how carefully he grades work, how prepared he is for classes, how tidy he keeps his classroom… all of this is noticed by students at a subconscious level. More importantly, they notice how much the teacher cares about these things. The more care, respect, and love they put into their class, the stronger the signal is to the students that they should care for, respect, and love their class. This is what we mean by dignity—to treat all parts of the school with care and respect: the students, the teachers, the assignments, the physical space, the subjects, everything.

The teachers first embody this dignity themselves. They are on time and prepared. They give their full attention to the class and do not let themselves be distracted by their cell phones or similar things.  They treat the students with dignity and respect by modelling good manners, kindness, and understanding. They bring lots of jokes, fun, and enjoyment to the room, but never at the expense of a student, another teacher, or the dignity of the material they are teaching.

After embodying dignity themselves, they then expect it from their students. This involves negative feedback like checking students when humor goes too far, but it is also encoded positively in many rituals of the classroom. For example, each class begins with students standing at their desks ready to greet the teacher. Each teacher in turn makes up their own, often humorous, greeting with the students. For example, in my art appreciation class, I lead the students in a cheer—“Give me an ‘A’! Give me an ‘R’! Give me a ‘T’! What’s that spell?” This moment is humorous, but it also brings the whole class together for a common purpose. They have their desks ready and their chairs pushed in. They are giving me their attention, ready to begin the lesson. Silliness aside, they are showing me and my subject respect at the top of each class.

You can also see dignity instilled in the students in something as simple as the way they put work in their binders. Each binder is a complete chronological record of all their works and accomplishments in each subject. By expecting and requiring students to put work in their binders, we signal to them that their work is worthy of dignity and respect. By the end of the semester, they have binders thick with completed and corrected work, a trophy gallery of their accomplishments. The alternative, too common at other schools, is to have finished work tossed in the bottom of a backpack or the trash without any ceremony or respect.

Each of these small actions that fit under the heading of dignity signals the same message to the students: “What we do is valuable”. The students, the teachers, the lessons, the assignments, their materials, everything that is part of the endeavor of education is valuable and should be treated with respect and dignity.

RIGOR: INSPECT WHAT YOU EXPECT

It won’t be a surprise that teachers who expect their subjects to be treated with dignity and reverence really love their subjects. Because we love our subjects as much as we do, we expect a lot of the students who study them. Each of us feels like we possess special and valuable knowledge that we are eager to share with the children. The way we choose to share that knowledge is what we call rigor. Rigor is the commitment to make the most out of the time and energy teachers and students put into learning.

You can see rigor in the depth of the content we cover and the assignments we give. We give them challenging literature books, we dive deep into the great moments of history, we keep them on the edge of their ability in math class. Conversely, we think poorly of giving “easy” assignments like multiple choice and fill-in-the-blank work. It’s boring for us teachers because we want to get into the exciting and complicated parts of our subjects. Instead of being given easy work, starting at a very young age, students are asked to think critically and given open ended questions to work on.

You can also see rigor in the way we manage the time of the student. We are covetous of each second of class. With the exception of holiday parties, rarely is there a non-academic moment during class. This doesn’t mean that we don’t have academic games or creative assignments. There’s still lots of fun in the classroom, but it doesn’t look like non-academic distractions—pizza parties, movie days, “fun Fridays,” etc. We fill class time with meaningful work and keep distractions out.

You can also see rigor in the way we treat the work of the children. Mr. Lewis taught me another slogan when I started teaching, “You have to inspect what you expect.” Whenever a student touches a piece of paper, a teacher will typically grade it and give it individualized feedback. The purpose of this feedback is not to create a culture that is obsessed with performance, but to help them make corrections and learn from their mistakes before filing away their work. Without feedback and corrections, students lose half the value of most assignments and activities. This cycle of feedback and corrections acts like “compound interest”, enabling them to grow exponentially over time.  It also tells the children that their work matters to the teacher. It matters enough for the teacher to put their time into it.

For students, the rigor of the classroom results in a strong sense of efficacy. When each lesson and assignment pushes their abilities and they get feedback on their success, they get a sense of their own power. Each class becomes a new challenge that they can triumph over. The rigor of the teachers signals to the child: “We care about what you do.”

ATTACHMENT: BEING THE NORTH STAR

Even though these virtues flow from a love of the subjects we teach, this talk of rigor and dignity can create a sense that VDA is strict and stuffy. Similarly, from a distance and on paper, VDA sometimes gets pegged as a classical education school, which comes with connotations of dreary memorization and teachers as harsh taskmasters. Yet this oppressive image could not be further from the truth. There is an enormous amount of affection and fun at VDA. (As I’m typing these words, I can hear teachers joking with students down the hall at lunch. And by the time I edited these words, a teacher and I had played a good-natured prank on each other in front of the students.)

This fun and affection that permeates the school is a product of the attachments we form with students. By attachment we mean forming a relationship with the child such that the student wants to be guided by the teacher—the teacher acts as a north star for the child’s actions in the context of the class. They are motivated to participate in our rigorous and dignified curriculum and to live up to our high standards, in part, because of the attachment they feel for their teachers.  These strong attachments are facilitated by some unique ways VDA is structured, but also because of the way teachers try to form these attachments.

VDA has small class sizes (15 or 16 students), a small student body (140 students), and is organized so that specialist teachers will spend, not just one year with a student, but three, four, five or more years with the same students. These structural factors make each teacher a bigger part of the child’s life. The teachers know all the students in the school by name and have a long experience with them where they learn their strengths and weaknesses. They can also make each student feel seen because there are relatively few of them in each class. Contrast this with a larger institution where students can get lost in a crowd, where no one knows their name and they know the names of few others, and where the connections they form with teachers are shallow and short-lived. It is no wonder that VDA students form strong attachments with their teachers.

In addition to relying on these structural factors, each teacher tries in their own way to form stronger attachments with the children. Some teachers, like Miss VanDamme and Mrs. Steele, bond over common values and experiences with children—for example, sharing excitement over literature books or classroom pets. Other teachers, like Mr. Lewis and Mr. Cobra, introduce the children to their passions and personality—for example, introducing them to great works of music, the heroism of space flight, or the pleasures of Aussie-rules football. Still others, like Miss Beach and myself, take special care to make each child feel seen, cared for, and understood—we ask about their interests and help them when they feel hurt.

We play games with students outside of class, we crack jokes in class, we share space with the kids, and we keep up with the goings on in their lives. And when something goes wrong, when a student is sad, hurt, or in trouble, we try to approach those moments with empathy and understanding. All of these things that help our students to form strong attachments send a signal to the child: “We like you, and we want to share this special work with you.”

IMPACT ON STUDENTS

Each teacher embodies these virtues in ways that are unique to their personality and the subjects they teach—they have different assignments, forms of relationships, and classroom rituals—but they all embody these virtues in some way. When a student is surrounded by a community of teachers with these virtues, who signal to them in every action, “What we do is valuable, we care about what you do, we like you and what to share this special work with you,” it is rare that a student will not feel intrinsically motivated to achieve. Even students who come to us from a different environment with different norms quickly find VDA’s culture one that they want to join.

That is the hallmark of the VDA experience for students: intrinsic motivation. The students follow the rules and work hard, not because of some external factors like punishment, grades, rewards, or praise, but because they genuinely like the teachers and the work they do. This is the secret to how we have high performing students without a performance-obsessed culture. Together, the students and teachers can achieve a great deal with relative ease since they are working toward a common goal everyone has bought into. Because of all that these virtues accomplish in the classroom, if I were to make a “family crest” just for the faculty of VDA, the motto emblazoned on it would read: Dignity, Rigor, Attachment.