Back-to-school season has just ended, when department stores across the land were filled with things that people think teachers need. Who, for instance, can say that a classroom is ready to welcome a new crop of fresh faces without a felt wall hanging that gloats “Little minds need big hearts” in fancy gold script?

How could we possibly teach children to decode words, write poetry, multiply negative numbers or analyse the political and legal ramifications of the Lend-Lease Act without drinking coffee from a mug that pontificates, “Teachers are like the rain: they make the flowers bloom” in the cutesily tilted block letters that connote childhood? And surely there’s no better way to relax after a hard day’s labour in the classroom than coming home and putting on a screen-printed T-shirt of an apple wearing a cape that smugly self-congratulates “I’m a teacher - what’s your superpower?”

It usually takes no more than a few weeks to see the same teacher things collecting dust on charity-shop shelves. I have donated a handful of these items myself over the years.

None of this is meant to imply that I do not want a wall hanging, a mug or a T-shirt. I absolutely do, but I want to be picky about what it says. To anyone reading this who is currently in the market for a teacher thing for me, I can absolutely promise not to donate to a jumble sale anything printed with the following: “Big minds need thoughtful, curious, intellectually driven teachers who painstakingly plan rigorous and engaging lessons that align with students’ zone of proximal development” or “Teachers are like the rain: they are but one of many important factors, alongside air, nutrients and soil, that allow plant life to thrive”. And my absolute favourite would be: “I’m a teacher, so I’m working to make myself unnecessary”.

Let me explain.

I teach first grade (Year 2) in Boston, Massachusetts. The students in my class all speak Spanish as a native language and experience significant socioeconomic adversity. Through grant funding, I’ve had the privilege of visiting primary schools across England for the purpose of comparative research on oracy.

It was these observations, at schools in London, Leeds, Hull, Bishop’s Stortford, Bradford, Huddersfield and Cambridge, that inspired the last suggested slogan.

Teachers across England have opened their classroom doors, allowing me to see mostly high-quality (and, if I’m honest, some pretty low-quality) oracy instruction in a country that prioritises it far more than we do in the US. In the tradition of travellers with notebooks in foreign countries, I also got to tune in to what otherwise goes unremarked for teachers whose daily lived experience is my exotic foreign escapade.

Here is a quick rundown of the quirks and idiosyncrasies I wasn’t officially there to observe, per se, but that fascinated me about English schools:

• Printed handwriting is slanted, with lovely curls and curves - I particularly appreciated the mild flamboyance of the lower case “f” - to prepare children to eventually write in cursive.
• Cafeteria workers all seem to wear a sort of pith helmet to cover their hair, which makes them seem like extras in an Indiana Jones movie.
• Literally 100 per cent of the children and teachers I’ve met in England have asked me about yellow school buses - a source of endless delight (to be fair, 100 per cent of Americans are gleeful at the thought of a red double-decker bus).
• In a country with such a low rate of gun violence, the process of entering a school is, surprisingly, more difficult than in the US, even though we have experienced more than 230 school shootings over the past 20 years.
• Tea is offered graciously and relentlessly from giant hot-water tanks in staffrooms, which meant that I got really good at pretending to like it, as well as holding it in when my bladder was about to burst.
• The phrase “Aww, bless” is a simultaneously kindly and snarky refrain used when teachers chat about the unintentional comedy of the classroom, as in: “Hey Linda, little Timmy put a pencil in his nose and then the eraser got stuck up there and then he sneezed it out right after playtime.” “Aww, bless.”
• Starting at a young age, children generally travel to destinations in the school building as a class without a teacher leading them.

This last observation may seem as self-evident and unremarkable as me telling you that English children wear uniforms, but it is nonetheless striking because you will absolutely never see this in US schools.

Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion is a widely influential book on the specific techniques that build classroom culture, student engagement and high behavioural expectations. In a chapter on transitions, the author writes: “Another effective way to teach transitions is to use a method called point-to-point movement or, when transitions cause you to move around the building, point-to-point walking. You identify a location or an action, and students move to that point and stop.

“The key is that, as you instruct students to complete a step in the transition, you set not only a beginning but a stopping point in advance, so that the activity never gets out of your control.”

Novice teachers in the US often receive advice from coaches and principals along the lines of “Don’t turn your back on your kids” and “Never take your eyes off your students”. I have heard teachers say to me, in understandable frustration at not seeing their students behave successfully in class, “I feel like I can never look away for even a second”. I know - I have shared that thought myself.

Meanwhile, teachers in England do not seem to express such concerns (or they may just do a better job of hiding them than stereotypically emotive Americans), as evidenced by the fact that they routinely turn away for far more than a second (for example, when heading back into the classroom to chat with a visitor from the US instead of checking that their students have completed the 100-yard journey to the cafeteria with a minimum of mayhem and bloodshed).

A bigger message

So why is that a big deal? Maybe the difference between guiding children through the hallways and letting them walk independently belongs in the same category as the sides of the road we drive on: noticeable, yet benign. Or maybe that difference is about a bigger message that teachers convey to their students.

The vein of frustration and feedback expressed in the US around the no-no of looking away from children calls to mind the received wisdom of what to do when facing down a primal opponent in nature. Duke Kahanamoku, the father of modern surfing, advised: “Never turn your back on the ocean”, while the website of the Grizzly & Wolf Discovery Center in Montana recommends: “You probably should not turn your back on the bear until you cannot see it and it cannot see you any more.”

Our children are not waves to be conquered or bears to be outsmarted, yet they become our adversaries when we talk about them in a similar way. They also turn into children who are not capable of anything other than creating bedlam when they have opportunities to experience independence.

In 1968, Robert Rosenthal, a psychology professor at Harvard University, and Lenore Jacobson, an elementary school principal from San Francisco, published what has become an oft-referenced article called “Pygmalion in the Classroom”, which quantifies the relationship between teacher expectations and student achievement. Their data supports the conclusion that “one person’s expectations of another’s behaviour may come to serve as a self-fulfilling prophecy”.

When teachers in England send their classes to lunch without direct supervision, this micro-moment carries a macro-message. It tells children that they have independent agency, and that, when faced with the choice of moving peacefully through a place of learning or jabbing their friends with their elbows, they will likely choose the former over the latter, even when no one is looking.

It tells children that they are part of a democratic community and must take responsibility for upholding its norms. It tells children, especially those from immigrant backgrounds or who have suffered trauma, that there is a physical space in which they belong without question. It tells children that they are free people, instead of inmates who need to be guarded and managed.

At this point, you may be wondering if I took this small yet powerful practice home from England with me. Do I continue to shuttle the future scientists, carpenters, philosophers and engineers of Boston through the hallways, as if I am all that stands between decorum and a Hobbesian state of nature?

The answer is: yes, I still take my students everywhere. Cultural habits are hard to break. When I have only ever led my classes around the school, and when my students have only ever been led, it is not easy to just stop doing it.

That said, I have tried some new teacher moves, with the intention that I can eventually abdicate this part of my job. Like all teachers, I use certain go-to phrases when enacting instructional routines, delivering praise or correcting misbehaviour.

This year, when a student violates classroom expectations, I have started to say: “We see you, we hear you, we know you”. My working theory is that, in order for children to go unwatched, they need to feel seen. I don’t mean that in a creepy way, like some kind of omniscient Big Brother. Rather, when children learn that they are visible, audible and knowable to the “we” of a community, they realise that their choices are important and that their actions matters to that community.

My hope is that children will begin to feel accountable to the group’s shared expectations and not to their teacher’s surveillance. Come and visit me in December, and you may just see a very English-looking group of first-graders making their way down the hall with their superfluous teacher out of view, neither seen nor heard.

So, just to remind anyone reading this who is in the market for a teacher thing for me, please find a wall hanging, mug or T-shirt that announces “I’m a teacher, so I’m working to make myself unnecessary”. Working on it, because I’m not there yet.

Josh Benjamin teaches first grade (Year 2) in Boston, Massachusetts

This article originally appeared in the 25 October 2019 issue under the headline “In praise of benign ‘neglect’”