The Power of Walking Away

An Evolutionary Look at Why Kids Can't Just Get Along in the Classroom

If you’ve ever taken any sort of car trip with kids, you know the dreaded, inevitable cry from the back seat: “HE’S TOUCHING ME!” That scenario is also the best way to describe a classroom in June. After ten months in the same classroom, for upwards of six hours a day, the students are like a bunch of siblings that have spent way too much time confined together. While they do value and enjoy each other, they are also overtired, overexcited, and hot (it’s June and there is no AC!). As a result, they are on each others’ last nerves. The bickering and tattling is unmatched from any other point in the year. Metaphorically, we are ready to get out of the car!

It can be frustrating that kids cannot just manage to get along in the classroom. Why do we, as teachers, spend so much instructional time mediating social issues in our classrooms (especially at the end of the year)? An evolutionary perspective about the way our education system is set up may hold some clues.

Evolutionary and Classroom Conditions

I’ve written before (here) about how age-stratified classrooms are mismatched from how our ancestors evolved to learn—namely through mixed-age play groups. Under ancestral conditions, playmates would have been limited. With hunter-gatherer groups composed of about 150 individuals, it would have been rare for children to have had a significant quantity of peers who were exactly the same age (see Dunbar, 1992). As a result, age-mixing would have been the norm. Additionally, ancestral learning was largely driven by children and free of adult influence (see Gray, 2011). As play is a self-directed endeavor, children would have been free to join and leave social experiences freely as they learned to navigate group social dynamics.

Contrast this natural educational model with today’s schools. For the sake of efficiency and standards-based learning, children today spend much of the school day in classes with 24 or so other children of the exact same age. This age-stratified setup has implications for academic competition, perceived self-efficacy, and overall achievement and development (see Gray, 2011). This age-based classroom system also means that children are forced to spend significant amounts of time, day after day, with the same peers.

Autonomy to Walk Away

To best understand this point, first consider play. When children engage in free play together, there is an understanding that games only continue if there is agreement, cooperation, fairness, etc. If kids could not agree on the rules of a lunchtime kickball game, the logical conclusion is that the game would end. However since play is engaging and motivating for kids, there is a natural drive to work out social disagreements for the sake of keeping the game going. This model of play and autonomy of engagement naturally teaches children critical social skills like mediation, turn taking, perspective taking, etc. (Gray, 2011). If kids were not learning these skills, they would not be able to play together.

Compare the above with schools. Social scenarios look and play out very differently in the classroom. Due to set class rosters and seating arrangements that are typically dictated by the teacher, children do not have the autonomy to freely leave or join social situations. Children are told where to sit, when to sit there, who to work with, and who they cannot work with. This directed seating is all done for the sake of learning. There is the positive intention of decreasing distractions and increasing productivity for children.

So why can’t children get along? With this dictated model of social engagement, children lose out on the opportunity to naturally develop collaborative skills such as they do during play. Two critical components are missing in the classroom: the inherently motivating nature of play and the autonomy to leave a social situation that is not going well. As such, we commonly see classroom issues like bickering, tattling, whining, etc. So much of what we do in schools focuses on explicitly teaching social skills and helping kids navigate these social challenges. This work is critical! Yet, no amount of explicit teaching of SEL skills can replace the authentic learning of collaborative skills that are developed when kids have the ability to leave desirable social disagreements. Structured classrooms and dictated seating rob children of the opportunity to take ownership over their social interactions and learn from those social experiences.

We want children in the classroom to get along, but are ultimately not setting up an environment that gives them the tools to learn how to do so. At the end of the year when emotions are high and energy is low, we see the consequences of not focusing on these critical social skills. Kids are more likely to bicker because they have spent the entire school year attempting to get along in an environment significantly mismatched from the autonomy-driven conditions they evolved to expect. Managing these conditions is tiring and children are demonstrating restraint collapse from doing so. Kids, fatigued from the work, just can’t hold it together anymore.

Takeaways

As with much of what I write, the takeaway is not that we need to scrap the education system and go back to a model of education that exactly mirrors how our ancestors learned. Don’t go in tomorrow and burn all your seating charts! However, it is important that we recognize the challenging, mismatched situation faced by modern students and think of ways we can slightly shift practice to take advantage of some evolved learning mechanisms.

Here are a few ideas to help capitalize on these mechanisms:

• Move seats often. Children who are forced to collaborate with the same peer day after day do not stand to learn much from that setup. They are more likely to just get on one another’s nerves after prolonged proximity. By frequently working with peers, children gain practice navigating different social dynamics in the classroom. If something isn’t working, it isn’t long before they get to try something new.

• Explore flexible seating. I will admit I have not fully bought into this movement of letting children, especially young children, freely choose from a variety of furniture yet. The research on the effectiveness of flexible seating is mixed (see Cole et al., 2021). However, the theory is that this type of flexible model will allow more opportunities for children to take ownership over their social interactions.

• Create alternative spaces for work. If you don’t want to go full flexible seating, set up a few extra desks or spaces. Set the expectation that when there is disagreement at a table or group, children have the ability to get up and walk away to work elsewhere. As with flexible seating, this system gives them some ownership over their social interactions.

• Get out of the classroom. Make time for play and recess where children have the freedom to develop these social skills through play that can then be transferred to other social contexts. I stand by the idea of the most important skills can only be learned though play!

A line that will always stick with me from a professional development class is that “a seat should not be a life sentence.” We need to give children ownership over their social interactions, not just during play, but during the school day as well. If schools are only focused on the acquisition of academic knowledge, we miss the critical and foundational social learning that happens (or can happen) in classrooms. An evolutionary perspective gives us some insights how to naturally help our children develop important social skills that foster productive collaboration throughout their lives. Considering the appropriate time and manner to do so in the classroom, guided by your own teaching philosophy and style, will help set students up for success and minimize the end-of-year bickering. And if not, at least summer is right around the corner! Teachers, we are almost out of that metaphorical car!

References:

Cole, K., Schroeder, K., Bataineh, M., & Al-Bataineh, A. (2021). Flexible Seating Impact on Classroom Environment. TOJET: The Turkish Online Journal of Educational Technology, 20, 62-71.

Dunbar, R.I.M. (1992). Neocortex size as a constraint on group size in primates. Journal of Human Evolution, 22, 469-493.

Gray, P. (2011). The special value of children’s age-mixed play. American Journal of Play, 3 (4), 500-522.