Inner Forge Learning

A case study in how a non-reflective practice keeps causing harm.

A note before we begin: this case study comes from a real experience. The names are invented, and some of the details have been changed, to protect the individuals involved. I am telling it as a case study anyway, because a story with the identifying details sanded off stops us from litigating one particular person and starts us examining a pattern. We cannot dismiss a fictional teacher as just a bad one. We have to ask what keeps producing her.

That question matters more than any verdict.

Here is the year, as Andi lived it.

The Wall

Misbehaviour in Ms. Howlette’s class had one main consequence: standing on the wall at recess. Talk during work time, forget your materials, laugh at the wrong moment: the wall. It required no conversation, no explanation of harm, no plan for repair. It taught the class, every day, that the response to error is exclusion.

Punishment that excludes never requires the person who caused the harm to face the person who was harmed. It converts a relational rupture into a transaction: you did the crime, you serve the time, and the ledger closes. Students learn this logic quickly. It is not a lesson about responsibility. It is a lesson about power.

The Raised Voice

Ms. Howlette raised her voice often. From the front of the room it may have felt like firmness. From the desks it landed as anger. Some students flinched. Some stopped asking questions, because asking a question in a loud room means risking a louder answer.

The teacher’s experience of her own voice and the students’ experience of it are two different realities, and neither one is simply false. In a reflective practice, that gap is a subject for inquiry. In a non-reflective practice, it is a subject for denial, and denial has to be defended with more volume.

“You Have to Have Learned Something”

Andi is the kind of student who finishes early, checks their work, and asks for more. Halfway through the year, Andi told Ms. Howlette, honestly and perhaps clumsily, that they hadn’t learned anything from a unit because the material was too easy.

Ms. Howlette’s reply: “You have to have learned something.” Repeated as Andi tried to explain why they wrote what they wrote.

That sentence dismisses the student’s report of their own experience and replaces a conversation about learning with an assertion about what must be true. The reflective version costs one sentence more. “Tell me what’s feeling too easy. Help me see it from your side.” Instead, the student learned that honest feedback gets corrected by authority, and the teacher learned nothing at all.

The Paper Towel Rule

The class was not permitted to dry their hands with paper towel. The stated reason: students used too much.

This is a reactionary rule, a response to a problem that bypasses teaching entirely. The adult’s answer was not “how do I teach them to do this well?” but “how do I make this error impossible?” The alternative was slower and harder: ten minutes teaching children how to wash and dry their hands, then correcting when it wasn’t working, then reteaching. That is the slow, difficult work of teaching, and it is exactly the work a rule lets an adult skip.

But a rule is not neutral. The wall says: when you get something wrong, you are removed from the community. The paper towel rule says: when you get something wrong, the capacity is removed from you. Both bypass the relationship between error and learning. Children learn that the world responds to error by restriction rather than by teaching.

What the Parents Were Told

When Andi’s family raised concerns, intentions were offered as evidence: “I would never yell at students.” Incidents were reframed, minimized, or denied. Over time the family found themselves doing the quiet arithmetic of doubt: is our child exaggerating, are we the problem?

This is what people mean by gaslighting: not simple disagreement, but the systematic use of one’s own good intentions to overwrite another person’s experience. Intentions are real, and they matter to the person holding them. But harm is measured at the other end of the relationship.

The Standardized Assessment

In the early part of the year, an assessment arrived with standard requirements that Andi, despite asking, never fully received. Andi’s work could have then be judged against a standard Andi had been given unequal opportunity to meet if it weren’t for her parents raising a concern mid-assessment.

When this was raised, something happened that at first looks like progress. There was action. The situation was adjusted. But there was no acknowledgment. No one said: you were right, you were not given the same access, that was a failure on our side, and here is what we are doing about it. Action without acknowledgment is not repair. It is a settlement, and settlements settle nothing relationally. They just end the negotiation.

What Makes This a Pattern?

It is tempting to file each incident separately: a discipline policy, a tone problem, a dismissive comment, a hygiene rule, a difficult conversation, an assessment hiccup. But the structure here is one thing. In every incident, error was treated as a threat to authority rather than as information about reality.

A reflective practice reverses the polarity. Error becomes data. The question shifts from “how do I make this stop?” to “what is this telling me?” That shift is small, and it changes everything downstream of it.

Where the Wall Comes From

The wall, the name on the board, the sticker chart, the lost minutes of recess: none of these arrived from research about how children develop responsibility. They are inherited tools, and they encode the assumptions of the people who made them. That behaviour is a compliance problem. That the young must be conditioned through reward and punishment. That the teacher’s primary job is order.

Asked honestly, the wall starts to look less like a neutral technique and more like a philosophy, one in which wrongdoing is a debt repaid through suffering rather than a rupture repaired through relationship.

What Reconciliation Asks of a Classroom

In Canada, The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action 62 and 63 direct education systems toward Indigenous knowledge and teaching methods, and toward intercultural understanding, empathy, and mutual respect. But it is possible to teach the content of reconciliation while running a classroom that is structurally unreconciled. You can hang the word on the wall while the wall is the punishment.

I have been fortunate to have long conversations with a Mohawk artist about what community-embedded ethics look like in practice this year. What struck me most was this: in that tradition, wrongdoing is understood as relational. It is not automatically punishable. Sometimes the response to harm is not exile but assembly. The community comes together, the difficult conversation is held, the harm is owned out loud, and a real plan is made to undo what was done through action and practice.

Notice what this requires that our inherited toolkit does not: truth first. Reconciliation is not a mood of niceness applied over an unacknowledged rupture. It is a sequence. Truth, Ownership, Repair, Changed Practice.

What the Meeting Would Sound Like

So here is the question I keep circling. What would it actually look like for a teacher like Ms. Howlette to grow? Not in the abstract. In a meeting with parents.

No such meeting has happened yet. But I keep imagining one, because I think parents know the sound of growth when they hear it, and it is different from the sound of a teacher defending herself. They would be listening for four things.

First, truth without hedging. “Here is what I did, here is who it affected, and here is the impact it had.” Not “I would never.” A teacher who can describe her own practice accurately, including the parts that failed, is showing parents the one thing that makes change possible: she can see it.

Second, ownership without defensiveness. This is the moment where the teacher stops managing how she is being perceived and starts accounting for what she did. Parents can tell the difference between “I’m sorry you feel that way” and “I was wrong, and here is what I have learned about myself in this.”

Third, specific changes, not promises. “I’ll be more mindful” is a mood. “I’ve retired the wall, and here is what happens instead: a conversation, a plan for repair, and a way back into the room” is a practice. Practices can be observed. Promises can only be believed.

Fourth, follow-through that includes the family. A teacher who is genuinely growing does not ask parents to trust her. She gives them a way to verify. A check-in date. An invitation to raise concerns early. A stated plan for what happens if the pattern returns. Growth that cannot be checked on is indistinguishable from a performance of growth.

And here is the deepest tell. A growing teacher spends most of the meeting describing what she has learned about herself. A defending teacher spends most of the meeting describing what the student needs to do. Parents hear that difference immediately, because one of those teachers is still in relationship with the child, and the other is managing risk.

Where This Leaves Us

How does a non-reflective practice continue to cause harm? The honest answer is that it does not need malice. It just needs the absence of one habit, the habit of turning, after every hard moment, and asking “what was my part in this, and what do I now know that I didn’t?”

Ms. Howlette was almost certainly not a villain. She was a teacher running inherited software, defending it the way we all defend what we have never examined. The harm was ordinary, the harm was systemic, and the cure was never a mystery.

The meeting I have described has not happened. No conversation toward reconciliation has taken place, and there is no guarantee one will. But I hold on to the hope that it might, and that somewhere inside it a teacher finds the sentence every child in that room needed to hear:

“That was harmful. I’m sorry. Here is what changes.”

Every one of us who teaches should practice saying it out loud, before the meeting ever comes.