The first few weeks of school come with a lot of explaining. Where backpacks go. When students can get up. How to enter the room. What happens during independent work. What voices should sound like in the hallway. How technology is used. What to do when someone needs help. None of this is unnecessary.
Teachers need routines and students need structure. Thirty people cannot share a classroom well without some clear agreements about how they are going to live and learn together.
But I think there is a question we could ask more often when we establish those expectations: What is this rule actually protecting?
Take something simple like, “No running in the hallway.” Most students already know the rule. They have probably heard it hundreds of times. But knowing a rule and understanding it are not the same thing. If we stop and talk about the people using that hallway, the reason becomes clearer. Someone may be coming around the corner. A younger student may be carrying something. Another class may be working with the door open. Someone may need more physical space to move safely. Walking in the hallway is no longer just an adult preference. It is connected to safety, learning, and the rights of the people sharing that space.
That is a much more useful conversation than simply repeating the direction louder.
Ontario’s provincial Code of Conduct already frames school expectations around ideas such as dignity, respect for the rights of others, fair treatment, responsible citizenship, peaceful conflict resolution, and maintaining environments where people can learn and teach. Those are bigger ideas than rule-following. They describe what school expectations are supposed to protect.
The same thinking runs through the Web of Rights. Rights do not sit in isolation. They bump into each other all day long. My right to speak connects to your right to be heard. My freedom to move through the room connects to your right to feel safe. My need for a particular support may look different from yours because treating everyone fairly does not always mean treating everyone identically. The work is helping students see those connections and then giving them some structure for navigating them.
I saw this most clearly when I first started developing the Web of Rights with very young students. They understood personal preference and identity quickly. They knew I could not tell them what their favourite food was or what game they were allowed to enjoy. From there, we could begin talking about what happens when one person’s preferences bump into another person’s safety or boundaries. That is where the conversation becomes educational. Instead of shutting the whole thing down, we can ask what agreements are needed so more than one right can be protected.
The same approach works with ordinary classroom expectations.
Think about something as familiar as listening while someone else is speaking. We can say, “Don’t interrupt,” and leave it there. Or we can ask students why that agreement exists. A student may say it is hard to think when people talk over them. Another may point out that quieter students rarely get a chance to contribute. Someone else may recognize that listening is part of showing respect.
Now the class has something more useful than a rule. They have begun connecting voice, dignity, and participation.
That understanding becomes useful later, when the classroom gets messy.
If a student interrupts repeatedly, I can certainly remind them of the expectation. Sometimes that is all the moment requires. But I also have another question available: “Whose voice is being affected right now?” That moves the conversation beyond whether the student obeyed me. It asks them to think about impact.
That is a very different kind of learning.
And I know September is already full. Teachers are learning names, establishing routines, assessing students, answering family emails, navigating behaviour, troubleshooting technology, and trying to remember where they put the coffee they made twenty minutes ago. Nobody needs another elaborate first-week initiative.
So start with one expectation you were already going to teach. Ask what it protects. Let students talk about it.
Give them the language to connect that expectation to safety, dignity, voice, learning, belonging, or another right that fits the situation. Then use that same language when the expectation is tested. The Implementation Planner was built around this idea of making expectations visible, teachable, and shared rather than relying only on repeated reminders or consequences.
None of this means adults stop leading. Student voice does not require teachers to hand over every decision. There will always be moments when the adult in the room needs to make the call, especially when safety is involved. I have never understood student voice as the absence of adult responsibility. I understand it as part of responsible adult leadership.
The difference is that students are more than people we manage through the school day. They are learning how to live alongside other people. They are learning what to do when needs conflict, when boundaries are crossed, when someone feels unheard, or when their own choices affect somebody else.
Rules can help with that, but only if we teach the thinking underneath them.
So as classrooms settle into a new school year, I would spend a little less energy trying to create the perfect list of rules and a little more time helping students understand what those rules are there to protect.
That is where structure starts to become something students can understand, use, and eventually help uphold themselves.
Want to take this thinking into your classroom?
You don’t need to rebuild your classroom expectations all at once. Start with one rule, one routine, or one conflict that keeps coming up and ask what rights it is there to protect.
If you want some language and classroom examples to help you begin, the free Web of Rights Starter Guide walks through the framework, the foundational rights, and simple ways to start these conversations with students.
There are moments in school when the paperwork is done, the policy has been followed, the adult response can be justified, and still, the child in front of us has not really been served.
I think most educators know that feeling. It shows up in small ways at first. A student is struggling, and the conversation turns quickly to behaviour. A teacher is exhausted, and the answer becomes another initiative, another expectation, another system to manage. A parent raises a concern, and suddenly everyone starts speaking carefully, as though the language of school has become more important than the child’s experience of it.
That is the tension the book I'm writing, is trying to name.
I have spent more than two decades inside public education. I have seen extraordinary educators do deeply human work in systems that often make that work harder than it should be. I have seen schools protect students, open doors for students, and give children a place to belong. I have also seen students quietly diminished by routines, assumptions, labels, and policies that were never really built around who they are.
So this book did not begin from a distance. It began from classrooms, hallways, staff rooms, parent conversations, school meetings, and the quiet knowledge many people in education carry but don’t always feel free to say out loud.
We keep saying public education is here for students. I believe it should be. I still believe public education is one of the few places where children from different families, cultures, languages, identities, abilities, and experiences are meant to learn alongside one another. That is worth protecting. I haven’t written this book because I’ve given up on public education. I’ve written it because I haven’t.
But protecting public education cannot mean protecting every structure public education has inherited.
Some of those structures were built for efficiency. Some were built for sameness. Some were built to make large systems easier to manage. Some were built in another time, for another world, around a much narrower idea of the student. And now, many of those same structures are still shaping children who are growing up in a world that requires creativity, flexibility, collaboration, critical thought, and the ability to live well with difference.
That contradiction shows up everywhere once we start paying attention. It shows up when we call a quiet classroom successful without asking who feels safe enough to speak. It shows up when we treat the same consequence as fairness, even when the students involved are carrying entirely different histories, needs, and circumstances. It shows up when a child’s movement, intensity, sensitivity, or questioning is treated as something to correct before it is understood. It shows up when student voice is invited only after the adult decision has already been made.
This is where I think schools have to become more honest.
A student is not simply a behaviour to manage, a score to report, or a problem to solve. A student is a person with rights. That sounds simple, but in practice, it changes how we understand almost every part of school life.
If students are rights-bearing people, then dignity, safety, voice, and belonging cannot be treated as extras. They cannot be offered when learning is smooth and withdrawn when learning becomes difficult. They have to be built into the structure of school itself.
That does not remove adult authority. It does not mean students get whatever they want. It does not mean classrooms become chaotic or expectations disappear. It means the authority adults hold has to be used in service of students, not simply in service of order.
There is a difference between a school system that manages students and a school system that serves them. A system that manages students is usually asking, “How do we get this child to comply?” A system that serves students is asking, “What conditions does this child need in order to learn, participate, repair, belong, and grow?”
Those questions lead to very different schools.
I think many educators already know this. They feel it on the hard days. They feel it when a student’s behaviour finally makes sense after someone takes the time to learn the story underneath it. They feel it when a conflict that could have become a punishment becomes a conversation, an agreement, or a repair. They feel it when students are given enough structure to use their voice well, and the room becomes more grounded instead of less.
Those moments are small, but they are not minor. They show what school can become when the system is willing to learn.
That is really the heart of School the System. For a long time, we have focused on schooling children into the existing structure. We teach them how to line up, wait, produce, perform, meet the measure, and adapt. Some structure is necessary. Schools need routines. Communities need agreements. Children need limits, guidance, and adults who can hold steady when things become difficult.
But structure should serve students. When structure starts serving the system more than the child, we need to be honest enough to notice.
This book is trying to name the moment when compliance gets mistaken for learning. When sameness gets mistaken for fairness. When silence gets mistaken for respect. When a child is asked to become smaller so the system can remain unchanged.
I don’t think we change public education by pretending educators are not trying hard enough. Most of the educators I know are trying very hard. Many are carrying far more than the public sees. But care inside a strained system is not enough on its own. Good people can still be handed tools that don’t serve students well. Thoughtful leaders can still be pulled into decisions that protect process over people. Caring educators can still participate in patterns they would never have designed themselves.
That is why the system itself has to become part of the lesson.
If schools are truly here for students, then schools have to be willing to learn from students. Learn from the student who withdraws. Learn from the student who keeps getting sent out. Learn from the student who asks why. Learn from the student who does well on paper but feels invisible. Learn from the parent who senses something is wrong but does not yet have the language for it. Learn from the teacher who keeps saying, quietly, “This is not working.”
That is the work this book is trying to begin.
Not a finished answer. Not a perfect framework. Not another promise that schools can be transformed if everyone simply follows the steps. Something more honest than that.
A call to look carefully at what public education has inherited, what it still protects, and what students are asking us to become brave enough to change.
The first draft is finished. The work of refining it is just beginning. And maybe that feels fitting, because the book is asking of the system what writing is asking of me right now: revise what no longer serves, keep what is true, and be willing to learn from what is in front of you.
If this is the kind of school conversation you care about, I’ll be sharing more behind-the-book reflections through The Schooling Signal as School the System takes shape.
Ask most children what a rule is and they can usually give you an answer pretty quickly. Don’t run in the hallway. Raise your hand. Keep your hands to yourself. Wait your turn. Rules are familiar territory in school because children hear them all day long.
Ask the same group what a right is and the answers tend to get a little more interesting.
Some children will describe something they are allowed to do. Some will talk about fairness. Others will name something they want. Younger children often connect the idea of rights to things that feel very personal to them, like their favourite game, their family, their body, or the things they like and do not like.
That is actually a useful place to begin.
Before children can understand how rights connect, how one person’s rights can come into tension with someone else’s, or why communities need agreements, they need a simple understanding of what a right is in the first place. In the Web of Rights, I usually begin with a straightforward idea: a right is something every person deserves because they are a person.
That sounds simple, but it changes the way we talk to children about school.
A child does not earn the right to feel safe by behaving well. They do not earn dignity by completing their work. They do not lose the right to be heard because they made a poor choice. There may still be boundaries, consequences, routines, and adult decisions. Schools need structure. But rights do not switch on and off depending on whether a child is being compliant.
I think that is where some of the confusion begins. Children are often very familiar with privileges because schools use them all the time. Computer time might depend on expectations. A preferred activity might depend on the circumstances of the day. A teacher may decide where students sit or when certain things happen. Those decisions can change.
A child’s dignity should not.
When I first began exploring rights with young children, I found that identity was often one of the easiest ways into the conversation. A child understands that I cannot tell them what their favourite colour is. I cannot tell them their favourite food is hummus because mine is. They know that preference belongs to them. From there, the thinking can stretch. Their body belongs to them. Their feelings and identity are part of who they are. They deserve to feel safe. They deserve to be treated with respect.
And then comes the harder part: so does everyone else.
That is the beginning of the Web.
Teaching rights is not about telling children, “You have rights, so you get to do whatever you want.” A student can have the right to express an opinion and still hear no. They can have the right to play and still encounter limits around where, when, or how that play happens. They can disagree with an adult while the adult remains responsible for making the final decision.
What they are learning is that some things about being a person deserve protection even when adults are setting limits.
This is why I would not begin with a long lesson or a complicated definition. I would start with conversation.
What is something every person in this room deserves? Should everyone feel safe here? Should people be able to say when something is bothering them? Should people still be treated respectfully when they make a mistake?
I would also ask whether the teacher has rights.
That question is important because a rights-informed classroom is not built around children on one side and adults on the other. Everyone is part of the same community. The teacher has the right to feel safe. The student beside you has the right to learn. The child across the room has the right to be heard. You have those rights too.
Once children begin to understand that, the conversation starts to move away from “What am I allowed to do?” and toward something much more useful: “How do we live together when all of us have rights?”
That is where the real learning starts.
I would keep the first conversation small. There is no need to turn this into a giant unit on day one. If students leave understanding one idea clearly, that is enough: I have rights because I am a person, and so does everyone else.
Then use that language again when the classroom gets real.
Use it when someone interrupts. Use it when a child needs space. Use it when two students disagree about a game. Use it when you have to say no and want students to understand why.
The Web of Rights becomes useful when rights stop being something students learned about and start becoming language they use to understand the life they are already living together.
Want to Introduce This in Your Classroom?
If this feels like a useful place to begin, the free Web of Rights Starter Guide takes the next step. It includes foundational rights language, classroom examples, and discussion prompts designed to help students begin thinking about safety, dignity, voice, and shared responsibility.
Or, if you want to understand the framework before bringing it into your classroom, you can explore the Web of Rights here →
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