The RAKE Magazine

Taming the Lunch Line: The forgotten ketchup packet and other cafeteria conundrums

 

 

Excerpt: Whittier International Elementary in South Minneapolis is a popular selection in the state’s school-choice lottery system and thus has seen enrollment go from 350 students in 2005 to nearly 500 in 2007. With this population surge, about a hundred kids are shuffling through the cafeteria every thirty minutes—for five consecutive lunch periods.

Needless to say, things can get a little wild in what is already, by tradition, one of the more lawless realms at any K-12 institution. Seeking to impose some order, Whittier officials did a very au courant thing: They outsourced the problem to a consultant.

Nancy Burns is a certified classroom management trainer who has coached over ten-thousand teachers in her nine-year career. But in 2001, she began scrutinizing school lunchrooms. “I would do a classroom management conference and so many questions would come up about improving the cafeteria. Obviously, there was a need to make lunchtime work better,” she said. Since developing a training curriculum called “Cafeteria 101: Setting up for Success,” Burns has fully made over three school lunchrooms and consulted on several others. As far as she knows, this petite forty-year-old is the only person in Minnesota who specializes in this area.

“Truly, I’m passionate about cafeterias,” said Burns, even as she admits how goofy that sounds. Her zeal stems from the idea that a relatively calm, well-run lunch period has benefits that reach beyond the cafeteria. “It affects the atmosphere of an entire school,” she pointed out. “Teachers can pick up kids and dive right into learning without wasting time recovering from a madhouse feeding frenzy.”

Teachers learn new approach to discipline

 

Minneapolis, Minn. — About 100 teachers are practicing a technique designed to keep a disruption in the classroom from getting worse. The idea of this exercise is to demonstrate that a teacher's tone of voice is as important as what is said.

The teachers practice by repeating the phrase, "put the towel down."

Trainer Nancy Burns instructs the teachers "if the directions are given and the teacher starts to move... we know that 82 percent of communication is non-verbal... so that causes movement in our room as well."

The teachers are participating in a series of workshops that teach "Educational Non-Verbal Yardsticks" or ENVoy.

Nancy Burns, who is on leave from her job as an elementary school teacher in north Minneapolis, says Envoy teaches a new way to approach discipline.

Some people might find it odd to take a workshop over and over again. Not Cynthia Kelly and Nancy Burns, two of the Twin Cities’ most sought-after workshop presenters.

Both Kelly and Burns firmly believe professional development is an ongoing cycle. You learn a concept or skill in a workshop, you try it out in the classroom, you reflect upon the successes and failures of your personal experience, and you take the workshop again with a changed perception.

Kelly, Burns, Barbara Owens, Nadir Budhwani, and Jody Pfarr all will be offering exciting workshop opportunities this fall and winter through the college’s office of continuing professional studies.

The success of a more multifaceted approach to professional development, as championed by Kelly and Burns, is born out by research. Many studies have shown that educators need multiple positive experiences before new strategies are internalized into practice.

“Practice builds up confidence and competence,” says Kelly, who spent 32 years working in Minneapolis public schools.

“So much of it is readiness. I think many teachers are frustrated because they want to be more successful with diverse learners, but they don’t know how,” she says. “Teachers are like most students—if they don’t achieve immediate success, they tend to go back to their comfort level. We remind teachers that taking workshops once is sometimes not enough.”

Burns points out that practicing your “muscle memory” within an ongoing learning cycle is crucial. The skills that you implement within the first 48 hours of a workshop are the skills that are going to stick with you, she says.

Along with a growing number of other trainers, Kelly and Burns tailor their workshops to meet the particular needs of their students. While the theme and topic of the workshop may remain the same, the emphasis—and resulting learning outcomes—can be dramatically different.

ENVoY workshops, for example, are about classroom management—a challenge that faces both brand new and experienced teachers. Burns estimates that of the approximately 6,000 teachers she has trained, about 25 percent take her workshop again and 50 percent take a directly related workshop.