So I teach 2nd grade at a public school in a pretty nice district. Overall, our school doesn't have many behavior issues. We have mostly distracted/disrespectful behavior but not violent, aggressive, or destructive behavior for the most part. I'm new to this school this year but I'm in year 3.
I don't know how we ended up on this topic but one of the veteran teachers on my team who's been in this district basically as long as I've been alive was complaining about how lunch works at our elementary school right now. She wants to see it go back to "silent lunch" every day with "walk and talk" time. I'll be honest, at first I was very confused and had no idea what she was talking about. Once she explained it to me, I thought it sounded like it would be miserable for our kids, but I wanted to hear more perspectives.
So currently, us teachers walk our elementary school classes to lunch and they're expected to walk in a silent line to the cafeteria. Once they're sitting down for lunch, they can talk and eat and socialize. Then we pick them up after their half-hour lunch and take them back to the classrooms. We haven't had any major behavior or safety concerns during lunch this year. Maybe someone gets out of their seat here or there or kids bother each other but it's usual kid-stuff. Stuff we can easily address and no one is getting hurt.
Her suggestion was to have the kids eat completely silently for their lunch time. They go to the cafeteria, all of them eat silently for only 20 min instead of the 30 min we have for lunch. Then with the other 10 min, they have a supervised walk by the playground on the outside of the school building where they're allowed to talk then. So basically we cut their "social time" to 10 minutes of walk-time and their only other chance to really talk with other kids would be our half-hour recess. Her logic is that they'll actually eat all their food if they aren't allowed to talk and there won't be a single conflict in the cafeteria if they can't talk.
I feel like it's unrealistic to ask elementary schoolers to be silent for 20 minutes of lunch. I also think cutting lunch to 20 minutes to make time for the walk time is condensing eating time too much. In my eyes, it really takes away a huge part of being a kid and developing social skills with peers. But I could also just be a newbie who doesn't know better.
So what do you all think? Do you all think silent lunch every day with a "walk and talk" time is a good idea at all?