The Love and Logic Approach

Love and Logic allows teachers to reach students social, emotional, and academic needs in a supportive environment that fosters growth in children. In a Love and Logic classroom, teachers approach students in a calm and empathetic manner and treat each child and situation as a unique circumstance. Love and Logic does away with laborious rules charts and infractions and does not believe in punitive punishments. Instead, children are treated with respect so they can learn how to treat adults and their classmates with respect. GCSD is implementing the Love and Logic approach district wide. 

Below are the 9 essential skills for the Love and Logic classroom:

1. Neutralizing Student Arguing

   • When teachers remove opportunities for arguing, students cannot argue. Teachers can achieve this by providing a direct statement to students and walking away.

2. Delaying Consequences

   • Teachers cannot deliver consequences and students cannot receive consequences if either are in dysregulated states. Delaying consequences allows teachers to create meaningful consequences based on the unique circumstance (rather than a knee-jerk reaction) and gives time for the student to regulate to be more receptive to the consequence. 

3. Empathy

   • Empathy is the core of Love and Logic. No Love and Logic practice can be delivered without sincere and genuine empathy. 

4. The Recovery Process

   • In order for a student to come out of a dysregulated state, students need to relax and recover to calm down and regulate. GCES provides opportunities for students to regulate and return to learning. You can learn more about the regulation process in the section below. 

5. Developing Positive Teacher and Student Relationships

   • In order for students to "buy in" to the Love and Logic approach, teachers must foster meaningful relationships with all students. 

6. Setting Limits with Enforceable Statements 

   • The less the teacher talks, the less opportunities students have to ingite power struggles. This also neutralizes arguing, as explained in essential skill 1. An example of an enforceable statement is, "I care too much about you to argue."

7. Using Choices to Prevent Power Struggles

   • All people (including students) crave control. By providing choices (that teachers are comfortable with offering) students need of control is met and teachers can manage their classroom in a calm, and empathetic manner. 

8. Quick and easy Preventative Interventions

   • Love and Logic believes in empowering teachers with prevantive interventions to utilize consistently to avoid power struggles and continue teaching without continued interruptions from instruction. 

9. Guiding Students to Own and Solve Their Problems

   • Love and Logic believes students must do the majority of critical thinking in order to learn from their decisions. By guiding students to own and solve their problems, students understand and are more receptive to consequences and the consequences can be meaningful and relevant. 

Regulate, Relate, Reason

As discussed in the Love and Logic Essential Skill #4, students need to have an opportunity and location to regulate their emotions so they can be in a headspace conducive to learning and growing. This "recovery space" or "regulation station" is a place for students to quietly calm themselves down before interacting with a trusted adult. Many classrooms have regulation stations directly within the classroom, or students can visit the regulation station in the principal's office. Once students are calm and ready to continue learning, the student can choose to speak further with an adult or they can head back to instruction (this will depend on the child and the individual circumstance). If a consequence is necessary, it is critical that the adult (teacher, administrator, or paraprofessional) first connects empathetically with the student before delivering a consequence. Also, as evident by Love and Logic Essential Skill #9, allowing the student to own their decision and create their own consequence can be most impactful and create the most significant learning moment for the child. The trusted adult always has veto power if the child's chosen consequence does not match the severity of the infraction.  Surprisingly, students often give themselves harsher consequences than adults!

To the right is an example of a regulation station currently in the principal's office. It contains a canopy, pillow, weighted stuffed animal, calming ball, fidgets, finger tracing puzzles, a pillow to identify emotions, and books about resilience and being calm. When students come to my regulation station, I first give them five minutes to calm down before having further discussions. If the student would like to discuss with me (or if a consequence is necessary) I begin by hearing their perspective in a calm and empathetic manner. I also always track in a Google Sheet when students visit my regulation station. I note the date, the day of the week, and the time of day. I also note the antecedent (what occured before the incident occured), the behavior of the child, and the consequence delivered (if necessary). This tracking system allows me to identify trends of when students visit my regulation station in order to determine the root causes of their behavior to help them improve their behavior over time. I also share these notes with the students so they can own their behaviors and be aware of how their behaviors are impacting their education and well-being. 

Intentional Movement Breaks

At Gilpin students (even some preschoolers) go to school from 8:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M. That is eight hours of learning for a children, even as young as 3 years old. That is a very long day! In order for students to maintain the stamina to stay academically engaged throughout the entire school day, teachers must provide opportunities for children to move. This doesn't mean a "free for all" for children to run around the classroom; instead, teachers must provide intentional movement within their classroom and throughout the school day. To satisfy students movement needs, teachers can utilize a range of strategies:

1. Center based instruction/ group work

   • Centers provide students the opportunity to get out of their chairs and move, as well as transition between activities in shorter intervals. Centers also provide teachers the opportunity to differentiate their instruction (by providing hands on activities and meet higher or lower academic levels) as well as include multiple engaging opportunities for students that doesn't occupy a large amount of instructional time. 

2. Intentional movement breaks

   • Sometimes after teacher led instruction or after finishing an assessment, students just need to move their bodies. Intentional movement breaks occur when teachers have their students complete some form of physical activity to get their energy out productively. These breaks are "intentional" because teachers focus on movements that activate their brain and connect to different areas in their bodies. For example, students will practice stretches that cross their midline, which requires focus and alertness. To the right is a "sensory path" which will soon be installed in the east wing of the elementary school. This provides students different movements within the hallway to help them expel energy and be ready to focus on instruction. 

3. Kinesthetic activities

   • Teachers can provide movement within instruction that simply gets students out of their chairs. An example is the "four corners" activity. When answering a multiple choice question, a teacher can place an "A,B,C,D" in each corner of the classroom. Students will answer the question by moving to the corner that matches the answer they believe is correct.