For Educators, Coaches, and Parents of Young Children
Educators serve as critical early relationships for young children and provide both emotional and physical safety, which is foundational for school readiness and effective learning. Glen Cooper, an originator of COS Classroom, has a line he's used for years, “Young children go to preschool to learn how to go to school, so they can go to school to learn.” In other words, secure educator relationships foster greater learning confidence and improved academic outcomes, increased resilience, and stronger foundations for all future relationships.
That was the subject of a webinar COSI hosted earlier this month, “Back to School! Bringing COS to the Classroom,” with Glen Cooper, joined by Deidre Quinlan and Trasie Topple. The conversation considered the back-to-school season by focusing on one of the most important moments of the day, the transition from home to school.
The Rowboat and the Dock
Cooper shared the example of his popular metaphor of the rowboat and the dock. He described it as a rowboat pulling up to a dock. The parent rows the child in. The child has to step off the boat and onto the dock, and for a second, they're neither fully in the boat nor fully on land. If nobody's paying attention to that moment, kids drift. He's watched it happen for decades, for example, a parent signs in, pats a child on the head, says “see you later,” and walks off, and the child is left looking a little lost, even the ones who are otherwise fine in a group of friends.
The fix he and his colleagues built is a short script called Someone to Be With, meant to be said by the teacher at the door, every morning, in some version of these words:
I'm here. It's my job to keep you safe. It's your parents' job to go start their day. It's your job to come have a good time. And when you need something, you come to me. I'm your person.
Why the Same Words, Every Morning
It's a small thing to say every single morning. Cooper pointed out that repetition is the point. Underneath the words is what he called phatic communication: the part of “hello” that isn't information at all, just two people confirming, I see you, you see me, I'm glad to be seen. Toddlers and preschoolers haven't learned that rhythm yet. The script teaches it to them, the same way a parent teaches a script for saying goodnight.
What It Looked Like in One Classroom
One story from the webinar stuck with us. Trasie Topple worked with a Head Start director in rural Georgia, Camilla Moss, whose staff had just finished a year of Circle of Security training. By day three of the new school year, drop-off was already noticeably calmer than it had been at the same point the year before, parents included. Moss described it simply, how everyone up front, staff and families both, felt safe because of the language they were using.
The Handoff Doesn't End at the Door
That safety isn't confined to the morning. Deidre Quinlan talked about how the same handoff logic runs through the whole day: primary groups small enough that a wandering child can say, “I'm looking for my teacher,” and mean someone specific, or a teacher telling their group, “Miss Jenny's in charge while I'm away,” before stepping out of the room. Every transition is a small rupture. Children are left without Hands on their Circle. Naming who's holding their Circle offers the needed repair and leaves the child with a felt sense of safety.
What the Research Found
Topple's own doctoral research, done in Head Start classrooms in Athens, Georgia, found something going on the team didn't expect. Teachers who'd been trained in Circle of Security reported less stress and less depression, largely because they finally had shared language for what was happening in their rooms. Share language brought shared understanding and with it a sense of connection. Another surprise was in how they rated their relationships with the children who had the most adverse experiences behind them. Those ratings went up after training in COS Classroom, while they went down in classrooms without it. It seems that something shifts in how a teacher sees a child's hardest behavior once they have a frame for what's underneath it.
Not Just for Four-Year-Olds
Cooper closed the session with a line Circle facilitators have been repeating in trainings for years:
For kids with secure attachment, anything works. For kids without it, nothing works, until we know better.
Some children walk into a classroom in September having already found a version of that security somewhere. For others, a teacher who offers consistency and predictably by showing up the same way every single morning may be the first place some children find it. Either way, Quinlan noted, it becomes a pattern the child carries forward, “This is what I look for in a relationship, even if it looks nothing like what I've known before.”
Bert Powell used a version of this work with teenagers who'd been removed from every other program in their district, and Kent Hoffman brought it into elementary classrooms. The rowboat and the handoff don't change. Only the age of the kid stepping onto the dock does.
The full recording is available to COSI Premium members in the myCOS Premium Learning Library. For educators who want to bring this into their own classrooms, the COS Classroom Foundations course introduces the Someone to Be With script in more depth, as well as many other ways to bring an attachment lens to early care settings. The Someone to Be With book offers a helpful guide and script for families and educators, written to support strong, first relationships for young children in early care settings. And it's a coloring book, too!
