At the Arlington School, teachers try to provide the best possible environment for learning by committing to the following:

We assume that all students can succeed. While we promise to be patient with failure, we will never accept failure as inevitable. We will be persistent.

Because all learning involves risk and exposure, and the fear of failure, ridicule, and boredom, we will always try to be organized and clear in presenting material, offer flexibility and variety in the curriculum, remain relaxed and humorous in the classroom, and be encouraging and patient at all times.

Teachers at the Arlington School commit to loving their subject and continuing to learn it. We will also commit to generating the enthusiasm that makes learning exciting. We believe that excitement in the classroom is a professional discipline, like the discipline of an actor who brings the requisite emotion to every performance, every day.

We will emphasize each student’s strengths. We will be flexible in offering any reasonable educational option that plays to those strengths. We will address the student where he or she is, not where we feel he or she should be. We will recognize with enthusiasm all forms of success and progress, behavioral or academic.

We will be friendly, kind and affectionate within appropriate boundaries to every student. Whatever his or her behavior, we will, as a matter of professional discipline, act as if each student is likable, so that the likable can emerge.

If our students had complete command over their feelings, impulses and behaviors they would not need a specialized setting like the Arlington School. We assume that teachers and staff will experience student behavior that is abrasive, disruptive, or hostile. We will always attempt to be empathetic and understanding of the students’ feelings and impulses, while making clear our expectations. Not all behaviors deserve our tolerance, but each has a cause. We will therefore at all times be respectful of the person, even when we are critical of his or her behavior.

We will listen to what the student is telling us, verbally or non-verbally, and attempt to understand it before we act.

In a touchy or volatile situation in the classroom, we will intentionally ignore the hidden agenda wherever possible, use humor (not sarcasm) or a moment of silence to defuse the situation, continue as if nothing has happened, and address the incident later with the student privately or with clinical staff.

When we are wrong, when we have been provoked to sarcasm or disrespect, when we have humiliated a student or acted in anger, we will apologize. We will also always accept students’ apologies and reparations and forgive, in order to model that behavior to everyone in the school community. Every day is a new start with each student.

We will never give up on a student, or on the possibility of that student’s progress. We will never stop putting energy into the relationship with each student.

We realize that teaching at the Arlington School is always a balancing act: it involves balancing the expectation of success with patience over failures, and balancing our empathy for the students’ problems with the students’ need to be challenged. We need sometimes to be more patient than the students themselves are with their failures; more excited with their progress than they can themselves be; more ambitious for them than they can be for themselves. In so doing we hope to gradually transfer each of these functions to them. Our goal is that all students reach their greatest potential as confident learners, and independent, empathetic people.