In De School, kids want to come earlier and leave later. The key to this intense commitment to their education: having a say in it. That’s new for everyone. “Children are capable of much more than we adults think.”

“Here’s an example of how we use consent”, says Eswara (10). “Our group wanted to do a welfare project, and we discussed two proposals: one on stray animals, another on guinea pigs. Since there are very few stray animals in our town, there was a consent round for the guinea pig project. In the consent round, every one gave consent, until we came to a girl who seemed grumpy. The teacher said: “If you don’t like this, than you can say so.” Then she said she didn’t know what guinea pigs are. I explained it to her, and then I could see she really accepted the guinea pig idea.”

The School started in August 2008, and works with the Sociocratic Circle-organization Method (SCM) inside and outside the classroom. In class, the children use SCM for making policy decisions within set boundaries. The School is located in Zandvoort, a coastal town 30 minutes from the Dutch capital, Amsterdam. There are 34 pupils and growing, three teachers, two assistants, a remedial education specialist, and a head of school. The School follows an unusual daytime schedule, 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., enabling an extended distribution of school tasks throughout the day and “after school activities” in the same building. Formal lessons are from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. and 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. The School is open 50 weeks a year, and children can leave for family vacations at family convenience so long as they meet Dutch minimal annual attendance requirements. The guinea-pig decision, cited earlier, took place in the group of children from 7-11 years old. The other group in school is for children from 4-6 years.

Courageous decision
Teacher Herman Burggraaf mentioned the same circle meeting. What struck him, a teacher with 20 years of experience in non-SCM education, was, “The girl that hesitated to give consent, dared, however shy she was, to say that she didn’t know what guinea pigs were.” Burggraaf is convinced that in a vote by raising hands, she simply would have voted along with the majority, looking at how her friends voted. “She would have felt little commitment to help those strange pigs everyone was talking about.”

Burggraaf, who has been with The School almost from the start, works with the group of 7-11 year olds. He has seen the children getting better at the consent meetings throughout the year. “They grow more into it, they realize: hey, it matters what I say!” That growth is especially clear to him in the “personal circle meetings,” held every ten weeks, where each child, the child’s parent(s), and the teacher establish learning goals for the child, using consent. Over the course of four meetings, Burggraaf has seen children change from silent participants to eloquent interlocutors. From the youngest child of 4 years, all the children participate in these personal circle meetings, contributing in accordance with their readiness and capabilities.

Pupils are more motivated
Eswara has had four of these meetings. “In the first one, I didn’t quite get it,” she says. “I didn’t say much. Now I know what the meeting is for. In the last one, I explained that I would like to do my language lessons separately, rather than mixed in with geography and history,. And that was possible. I do the language work faster now.” Her friend Esmée knows, thanks to the meetings, that she is not as good at arithmetic as she thought. “In my old school, I was not good at it. Here, we use a different book, and I thought I was doing better. But in the meeting, the teacher told me that I still make a lot of mistakes, and that I could take more time to do the assignments. That helps me a lot.”

Does the fact that the children have a say in how they like to learn at school (within boundaries, of course), have an impact on their motivation? Esmée: “Sure! My meeting helped me see that I made more mistakes than I thought. Now that I know I can take more time for my arithmetic, I’m going to check my sums!”

Leonieke Veldhuis has seen this increase in school motivation in her daughter, Shaelique. Her 6-year old acted listless before her first personal circle meeting. “In the meeting, she explained she felt kind of “in between” the little ones (4-6 years) and the older children (7-11) in school. “Her teacher suggested that she not go to the older group full time, but that her friend from the older group could come and play with her regularly. Now, she is back in school at full swing.” What made the difference says Veldhuis, is that her daughter “…was heard and was included in thinking up a solution.”

Having a say
Being heard, that is a big issue in The School. Its founder and head of school Marjolein Ploegman thinks that not being heard might very well be a cause of dropout and motivational problems in Dutch schools. In her work as a high school consultant on educational development, she has worked with and for a lot of schools over the years. Development of children doesn’t follow the strict stages that school curricula often follow, she thinks. “When children can influence their education on the basis of equivalence, they are more intrinsically motivated, because they have a say in their development,” she states.

The children don’t have an entirely free hand; the teachers co-steer the education. The teachers know what the children have to master during their school career. And the top circle of The School recognizes the national academic standards that children must meet before leaving primary school.

Ploegman is completing the circle structure of The School. The implementation of that structure has been staged: starting a school takes so much time, everything could not be done at once. There is now a top circle, there are circles for the parents, the two age groups, and the teaching team. A general circle consisting of teachers, student representatives, and Ploegman will start during the next school year. (Click here for a circle diagram.)

New information thanks to rounds
“Yes, it is sometimes hard to work sociocratically, because not everyone has had training in SCM. And yes, conditioning can be strong; everybody is learning in the process,” says Ploegman. But she sees the advantages of the method. “The rounds in the meetings provide new information, which helps us take better decisions. For instance, in the teacher’s team, as a head of school I try to think about what is best for everyone, that’s my conditioning. But it works better if everyone actually says how they look at things, policy-wise.”

Take, for example, the issue of schedules for the teachers. During the year, it turned out that more long term planning was necessary so that teachers would not use up their allocated working hours before the end of the year. But, Ploegman was reluctant to make a schedule for an entire year. She “couldn’t imagine that anyone would want to know the schedule a year in advance.” But in the rounds, during the meeting, the teachers said that that was what they wanted very much. So: question resolved!

There have been learning moments for every one. Veldhuis, mother of Shaelique, did not know much about SCM when her daughter started at The School. But, “Thanks to the explanations about SCM we get in the meetings, I understand better how it works.” She is enthusiastic about the method. “I feel connected to The School. We’re in this together. That’s a big difference from Shaelique’s former school.”

Let go of old reflexes
Teacher Herman Burggraaf says: “Every day, I realize I have to let go of old reflexes. After all, I’ve been in a non-SCM setting for 20 years. Kids can do a lot more than we adults think. I have to get used to that idea.” Thus, when a boy in a circle meeting of the older student group said the computer screens in the room bothered him, Burggraaf was surprised at first. They faced into the room so that Burggraaf could easily see what each child was doing on the computer. But to the boy, and others (that became clear in the meeting), the screens were distracting. Now, the monitor screens face the wall. Burggraaf has to go over and peek around the corner to see what a pupil is doing – a bit of extra work for him. But much better for the kids.

Also, thanks to the circle meetings, there are now “quiet corners” where the students can sit more away from the background noise in the class: some cupboards have been reshuffled more to the middle of the class room, as a room divider, and some tables are behind them. “At first, the parents didn’t understand.” Burggraaf smiles. “They thought the cupboards were in the way.”

Esmée, Eswara, and their friend Jackie like their group circle meetings a lot. Jackie says with a slight echo of contempt: “In my old school, we only sat in a circle on Mondays. We would tell about our weekend. We sang an “enjoy-your-meal” song, too. Here, the circle means something serious.”

No more fight
Perhaps the biggest advantage of SCM is the disappearance of the “fight” between teacher and pupils. Whereas in regular schools the teacher has all the power, at The School, when it comes to policy making, it’s the power of the argument that counts. In that situation, power is not related to a person. Burggraaf feels that very clearly. “It’s no longer my word against that of the children. They accept my guidance more easily, because they have given consent.”

Thus, Burggraaf’s group decided in a circle meeting not to bring a boy’s proposal for extra recess time to the next higher level. The time of the recess would diminish the working time in class. Had Burggraaf simply said “No” to that idea, he thinks he would have stifled the solution the children developed: pupils come to school earlier, in order to play together.

In The School, kids not only come earlier to school, they sometimes want to stay late. There are extra activities in the afternoon (cooking and yoga, for instance) in which children can participate. Or they can finish their work for that day. Not infrequently, when the parents arrive to take their kids home, they are welcomed with comments such as, “Oh, are you here already! I want to finish this first, can you come back later?” Sometimes they call their parents before the end of the day and ask to be picked up later.

True, it is difficult to establish whether this love for The School is more related to SCM or the flexible school hours and the integration of school and after-school activities. Burggraaf thinks it’s both. He says, however, that it is very clear to him that the children’s motivation to do schoolwork is SCM-related. Leonieke Veldhuis, mother of Shaelique, thinks that the influence the children have in their school life largely accounts for the peace and quiet in the building. “And that is so good, especially for the children.”

Click here for the website of De School. (Note: this link leads to a site translated by Google; if a key point is unclear, please contact the editor for assistance.)