Two weeks into my new position at the high school, I am beginning to feel the first signs of a rhythm.
I am still too close to the beginning to make any grand claims about what In-School Detention will become. Two weeks is hardly enough time to evaluate a program, much less to understand all of its consequences. Yet it is long enough to notice patterns. It is long enough to recognize when an idea that existed mostly on paper begins to acquire a life of its own.
So far, I feel good about what is happening.
The room is calmer than I feared it might be. Students are working. The routines are beginning to make sense. Teachers and administrators have responded positively to the changes I have made and, perhaps just as importantly, to my efforts to communicate what is happening in the room. Providing students with basic things—toast when they are hungry, coffee or tea, predictable restroom breaks, a place to work, a clear schedule—has helped make the room sufficiently self-contained that we can operate somewhat apart from the constant movement of the larger high school.
I have begun thinking of it as a microcommunity.
And then there is Circle.
At the end of the day, we come together to reflect before students leave. I introduced Circle because I wanted reflection to be something more substantial than a worksheet completed before dismissal. I wanted there to be a moment in which the day slowed down and students could consider where they had been, what had happened, and what returning to the larger school community might require of them.
What I did not anticipate was hearing students ask, “Are we doing Circle today?” on days I had planned to let the moment pass.
That small question has stayed with me.
A procedure I created is beginning, at least for some students, to become something they recognize as belonging to the room. It is no longer simply something I require. It is becoming part of what we do here.
That matters.
Perhaps that is why I find myself returning to Pieter de Hooch’s Teaching a Child to Walk. The painting appears, at first, almost too ordinary to carry the weight I am placing upon it. A small child stands near the center of a domestic interior. Behind the child, an adult provides support. Ahead, another woman offers an apple, giving the child both encouragement and destination. The room itself is orderly and contained. Light enters through the window. Everyday objects occupy the surrounding space. Nothing monumental is happening.
A child is learning to walk.
Yet the longer I look at it, the more profound the scene becomes.
Walking is among the earliest great acts of human independence. The child who once had to be carried begins to move through the world under their own power. But de Hooch reminds us of something we tend to forget when we romanticize independence: no child learns to walk independently.
Someone steadies the body.
Someone clears the path.
Someone waits nearby.
Someone provides a reason to take the next step.
Independence begins in dependence.
I increasingly think that this tension between dependence and independence describes what I hope ISD might accomplish.
Independence Through Dependence
Schools frequently speak the language of independence. We want students to become responsible. We expect them to manage their time, regulate their emotions, organize their work, resolve conflict, make reasonable decisions, and live with the consequences of those decisions. By high school, we sometimes speak about these capacities as though students either possess them or do not.
“He needs to be more responsible.”
“She needs to make better choices.”
“They need to learn some self-control.”
Usually, these statements are not wrong. They are simply incomplete.
They describe the desired destination without explaining how anyone gets there.
Developmental psychology offers a more complicated picture. Self-regulation is not simply something adolescents decide to possess. It develops through repeated experiences of regulation within relationships and environments. Before regulation becomes fully internal, much of it is external. Parents, teachers, schedules, expectations, social norms, routines, and physical environments help young people regulate attention, emotion, behavior, and time.
In other words, before we regulate ourselves, someone often helps regulate the world around us.
This process is sometimes described as co-regulation. The adult does not simply control the young person. Rather, the adult provides sufficient structure, emotional stability, modeling, and feedback that the young person gradually becomes more capable of performing those functions independently.
The goal is not dependence.
The goal is the gradual transfer of responsibility.
Vygotsky described learning as occurring within a zone of proximal development: the space between what a learner can already accomplish alone and what becomes possible with appropriate assistance. Educational theorists later developed the metaphor of scaffolding to describe that temporary support. Scaffolding allows something to be built that could not yet stand in precisely the same way without assistance.
But scaffolding is never supposed to become the building.
That distinction increasingly helps me understand what I am trying to accomplish in ISD.
The schedule is scaffolding.
The expectations are scaffolding.
The academic plan is scaffolding.
My redirections are scaffolding.
The structured breaks are scaffolding.
Circle is scaffolding.
Even the toast, coffee, and tea can function as scaffolding.
None of those things is the ultimate objective. I do not want students to become exceptionally good at functioning inside my room. I want the temporary structures of my room to help students become increasingly capable of functioning when those structures are absent.
The real test of ISD, then, does not occur inside ISD.
It occurs after students walk back through the door.
That gives considerably more meaning to the final two words of our expectations: Reflect and Reenter.
Reflection without reentry would be incomplete. Reentry is where whatever was practiced inside this unusually structured environment encounters the more complicated ecology of the larger school. There will be more people, more noise, more choices, more frustrations, more opportunities for avoidance, and less immediate support.
The question is not merely whether a student behaved while assigned to me.
The deeper question is whether the support provided here helped that student become even slightly more capable of supporting themselves somewhere else.
A Place Apart, but Not Outside
The room’s relative separation from the rest of the school has become important.
One of my early goals was to make ISD as self-contained as reasonably possible. Students should not need to wander the building repeatedly for food, drinks, materials, or other ordinary needs. Some of that is simply good management. Fewer transitions mean fewer opportunities for conflict or distraction.
But after two weeks, I think something more significant is happening.
By providing basic needs and establishing predictable rhythms, the room has begun developing its own culture.
There is a way the day begins.
There is a way academic work is approached.
There are designated moments for breaks.
There is a way we redirect.
There is a way the day ends.
Culture often emerges through precisely these repeated practices. What begins as procedure becomes ritual. What begins as my rule can eventually become our expectation. The social psychologist would recognize this as the gradual formation of norms. The educator recognizes it when students begin enforcing expectations upon themselves or anticipating what comes next without being told.
That is partly why students asking for Circle seems so important to me.
I am not naïve enough to interpret the question as proof of some dramatic transformation. Students can enjoy a routine for many reasons. But their asking suggests that Circle has begun to acquire value beyond my requirement that it occur. It has become recognizable. Predictable. Perhaps even useful.
There is a developmental distinction between compliance and internalization.
Compliance asks, What do I have to do?
Internalization begins asking, What do we do here?
Self-determination theory offers another useful lens. Ryan and Deci describe human motivation as being deeply connected to three psychological needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Importantly, autonomy should not be confused with the absence of structure. A person can experience meaningful autonomy within boundaries when those boundaries are understandable and when the individual retains some agency within them.
A student assigned to ISD obviously has not autonomously chosen to be there. The placement itself is a consequence. But what happens inside that consequence does not have to eliminate autonomy altogether.
Students can choose how they approach their work.
They can choose whether to engage honestly in reflection.
They can choose how they respond to frustration.
They can experience competence through completing something they believed they could not do.
They can experience relatedness through discovering that being removed from a classroom does not mean being removed from the human community.
That last point matters deeply to me.
Discipline necessarily involves boundaries, but boundaries need not communicate abandonment.
A student can be held accountable while simultaneously being fed.
A student can experience a consequence while still being treated with dignity.
A student can be told “no” without being told, implicitly or explicitly, “you no longer belong.”
The basic needs I provide are therefore not separate from the pedagogical philosophy of the room. They are part of it. Hunger makes academic concentration more difficult. Uncertainty invites anxiety. Inconsistency encourages testing. Predictability, by contrast, reduces the number of things a student must negotiate.
There is something almost domestic about de Hooch’s painting that helps me understand this.
The child learns to walk not in some abstract instructional laboratory but within an inhabited room. There is furniture. There are dishes. There is food. There are windows, walls, people, and light. Development occurs within an environment that has been arranged to support human life.
Environment is never neutral.
Bronfenbrenner’s ecological understanding of development reminds us that human behavior emerges through ongoing interactions between persons and their environments. Change the relationships, expectations, rhythms, and pressures within an environment, and different behaviors may become possible.
That is what I am attempting to do with ISD.
I cannot change everything about the student's life. I cannot undo whatever happened yesterday. I cannot remove every challenge waiting beyond the room. But for several hours, I can alter the immediate ecology.
I can slow the tempo.
I can make expectations explicit.
I can reduce uncertainty.
I can provide food.
I can offer academic help.
I can respond calmly when someone becomes agitated.
I can create room for reflection.
For a little while, I can make the ground beneath the student somewhat steadier.
And then they must walk.
Learning to Walk as Young Adults
The metaphor requires some care.
The high school students who enter my room are not toddlers, and I do not want to infantilize them by comparing them simplistically with de Hooch’s child. What interests me is not the child’s age but the developmental process depicted.
My students are learning to walk as young adults.
Adolescence is an extraordinary transitional period because the demand for independence accelerates while the capacities necessary to manage that independence are still developing. Adolescents are expected to make increasingly consequential decisions about academics, relationships, work, identity, and their futures. At the same time, the cognitive and emotional systems involved in planning, inhibition, emotional regulation, and long-term decision making continue to mature.
It is therefore unsurprising that adolescence contains contradiction.
The young person wants freedom and structure.
Privacy and connection.
Independence and reassurance.
Risk and safety.
Distance from adults and the knowledge that a trustworthy adult remains nearby.
We sometimes interpret those contradictions as hypocrisy or defiance when they are also characteristics of development.
Perhaps one of the responsibilities of educators is to tolerate that tension without resolving it too quickly.
De Hooch’s adults do not carry the child across the room. That would eliminate the learning.
Neither do they step away and insist that the child figure everything out alone.
They provide enough support that movement becomes possible.
That may be the difficult middle ground I am trying to find in ISD.
Too little structure, and I simply reproduce the circumstances in which a student may already be struggling.
Too much structure, and I risk replacing the student's agency with my own.
The art lies in determining what support is necessary now and what support can eventually be withdrawn.
That is pedagogy.
Then I Saw Myself
When I first began thinking about this painting, I saw my students in the child.
The more I have lived with it, however, the more uncomfortable, and useful, that interpretation has become.
Because I am also learning to walk.
After nineteen years in education, I find myself unexpectedly new again.
I am not a beginning teacher. I bring years of experience into this work. I have studied education, leadership, motivation, behavior, and human development. I entered ISD with a philosophy, a manual, expectations, procedures, and a fairly clear idea of what I wanted the room to become.
And then students arrived.
Theory met Monday morning.
Some things worked.
Some things did not.
Some ideas became more important than I expected. Others immediately needed revision. Circle began changing because students responded to it. The logistics of communication changed because teachers responded to them. The room itself began teaching me what it required.
Experience does not eliminate the need to learn how to walk when the ground changes.
That realization has been one of the most refreshing aspects of this move.
I am experienced enough to know that I do not know everything.
Perhaps that is one of the gifts of entering a new chapter late enough in a career to recognize the difference between expertise and certainty.
And just as I am asking students to accept support while they develop greater independence, I find myself doing the same.
Teachers have welcomed me.
Administrators have been responsive.
Colleagues have answered questions, sent work, offered encouragement, and treated ISD as something worth investing in.
The communication I have tried to create between ISD and the larger school has flowed in both directions. I am supporting students, but I am also being supported in supporting them.
That matters because my microcommunity cannot actually exist as an island.
ISD succeeds only insofar as it remains connected to the larger school.
Teachers provide academic work.
Administrators provide institutional support.
Counselors and other professionals contribute knowledge of students.
I communicate what I am seeing.
Students return.
The room needs boundaries, but those boundaries cannot become walls.
They must remain thresholds.
In that sense, the developmental psychology I see operating among students also describes my own transition. The lessons are different, but the process is recognizably human.
I am learning the expectations of a new environment.
I am internalizing new rhythms.
I am testing ideas against experience.
I am depending upon people around me.
I am becoming more competent within the new setting.
I am learning to walk into this chapter of my career.
The Next Step
There is something wonderfully modest about Teaching a Child to Walk.
No one in the painting is celebrating a graduation.
There is no finish line.
The child has not conquered the world.
The accomplishment is a step.
Then, presumably, another.
Perhaps that is the perspective I need after these first two weeks.
I am encouraged.
Students are asking for Circle.
The routines appear to be working.
Providing basic needs has helped the room become the kind of separate, predictable community I hoped it might be.
Teachers and administrators have responded positively.
Communication is improving.
There are signs that something worthwhile is taking shape.
But we are only beginning.
And perhaps beginnings should be measured differently.
The question at the beginning is not whether the journey has been completed. It is whether movement has begun.
For the students who enter my room, I hope ISD becomes a place where they can practice walking toward adulthood: learning responsibility, self-regulation, reflection, persistence, and the difficult use of freedom. I cannot make those choices for them. I cannot carry them into maturity. I can only arrange the environment so that another step becomes possible.
At the same time, I am making my own awkward first steps into a new stage of professional life.
We are not learning the same things.
We are not at the same stage.
But perhaps we are engaged in the same fundamental human task.
We are learning how to move forward without pretending that forward movement happens alone.
That may be what de Hooch understood so beautifully in this quiet domestic scene. The child’s dependence upon the adults is not evidence that independence has failed. It is the condition through which independence is becoming possible.
The hands that steady us are not necessarily obstacles to autonomy.
Sometimes they are how autonomy begins.
Independence is not the opposite of dependence. Independence is one of the things healthy dependence can teach us.
For now, I do not need ISD to be finished.
I do not need to know exactly what it will become.
There will be stumbles. There will be corrections. There will be days when the rhythms I am carefully building break down. There will be students for whom the structures do not seem sufficient and moments when I will have to reconsider what I thought I understood.
That is also part of learning to walk.
Two weeks in, I can see movement.
For now, the next step is enough.