Month: January 2018

Yoga as a promising way to keep students focused

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Elementary students in Kentucky’s Jefferson County schools are learning that holding a yoga pose requires mental attention and physical poise—skills they also use in the classroom.

More than 10,000 students across 25 Louisville elementary schools are taking part in a six-year pilot project called the Compassionate Schools Project. The project infuses fitness with health education and social and emotional learning in a curriculum aimed at the “whole child,” according to The Hechinger Report.

Students spend two 50-minute sessions a week doing exercises like partner yoga, which encourages students to practice mindfulness, cooperation, and problem-solving with their classmates.

From The Hechinger Report:

Tish Jennings, an associate professor at the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education, is one of the researchers who developed the curriculum and is studying its impact in Louisville-area schools . . .

Jennings sees whole-child education as critical to student success. Schools can’t focus only on academic content, she said, with students who don’t feel safe and calm in the classroom. Many children experience trauma at home or in their communities. Those experiences don’t disappear when the school bell rings.

Jennings’ study is currently in its fourth year, but Stonestreet Elementary School Principal Donnie Boemker believes he’s already seeing an impact.

Students are recognizing when they’re stressed or angry—through physical cues like tightened shoulders and furrowed brows—and are applying what they learned through the Compassionate Schools Project to keep their cool, he said.

“If you catch it up front, think about your breathing and those calming skills, it’ll help them in the long run,” he said, adding that kids regularly use the strategies and language from the program.

Jennings believes that helping students overcome obstacles outside of school, and to center themselves in class, will ultimately help to improve academics, and data from schools in the study should reflect that.

“If we don’t find ways to help them overcome these reactions from trauma that they bring to school with them, it’s going to be hard to teach them the academic content,” she said. “[The Compassionate Schools Project] is really helping prepare their bodies and minds—the whole child—to be ready to learn what we want them to learn.”

Gordon Marino, philosophy professor at St. Olaf College, reflected on advice from Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Mamet in an essay for The Hedgehog Review, a publication of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture.

Marino explained that he solicited one piece of advice from Mamet to pass along to his students. Mamet replied, “Tell them to pick some physical art—ballet, boxing, judo, yoga, whatever—and stick with it. It will make them feel grounded and better able to deal with adversity and rejection in this world.”

Marino summarized: “By moving your body in a certain way, he was saying, you will shape the way you feel and who you are.”

Through yoga, the Compassionate Schools Project helps students develop self-regulation, as well as other skills like focusing attention and cooperation. With practice, those skills will not only improve academics, but also help to shape students into better people.

The Compassionate Schools Project’s website offers more information on its mission, timeline, and partners, as well as details on how the initiative is advancing in Kentucky and its potential impact for other schools.

Fourth-graders teach adults to focus

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Good character is formed over a lifetime. At a recent Ashland (Oregon) School Board Meeting, board members were well-reminded of this fact as they were led through a series of mindfulness exercises by local 4th-grade students, reports the Ashland Daily Tidings.

Distractions are an unavoidable facet of our modern lives. Smart phones, social media, and other outlets pour a deluge of digital information into our brains. Being able to maintain attention to a task or important matter has become an essential trait for success in family, career, and life. If we were to think of attention as a resource, then it represents a precious commodity indeed.

Students at Bellview Elementary in Ashland have been working on this problem by participating in a program called, MindUp, and they came to the board meeting prepared to share their knowledge of how to “achieve and maintain focused attention.”

“MindUp really is about self-regulation and it’s about calming your body, and it’s brain-based learning,” said Bellview principal Christine McCollom. She has spearheaded the implementation of different character-education initiatives in her school, including a social-emotional curriculum and now MindUp.

Maintaining attention is a foundational ability with regard to character. McCollom highlighted this fact when explaining that she didn’t feel her students were prepared to dive right into social and emotional learning. “[T]he kids didn’t have all the precursor skills to do all that and [the] program wasn’t necessarily designed to provide that,” she said.

Hence, her school’s focus on attention and mindfulness. And so far, the effort seems to be paying off.

McCollom, like any good principal, withheld judgement of the program until she saw the data related to outcomes. So, her staff adopted a strengths and difficulties survey for students and she says, “We used that tool to measure whether or not [students’] social skills grew over the course of the year, and they did.”

Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture fellow Matt Crawford would be encouraged by the work at Bellview Elementary. He argued in the The Hedgehog Review that, “Attention is a resource; a person has only so much of it.” Crawford also urged readers to consider the impact of this line of thinking, “What if we saw attention in the same way that we saw air or water, as a valuable resource that we hold in common?”

We must remember that cultivating the habit of attention is challenging and important work. Charlotte Mason, a renowned British educator, wrote of the subject:

It is impossible to overstate the importance of this habit of attention. It is…”within the reach of everyone and should be made the primary object of all mental discipline”; for whatever the natural gifts of the child, it is only so far as the habit of attention is cultivated in him that he is able to make use of them.

Ambleside Schools International offers this helpful guide for educators to nurture this habit of attention in students through “a finite amount of time for specific work to be done.”

High school program works to build integrity

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Students at Cleveland’s Fairview High School are clamoring to join the pilot character education program “Because I said I would,” which aims to increase volunteerism by encouraging participants to keep their word.

Alex Sheen, co-founder of the Rocky River-based nonprofit, presented the program to students in November, and officials told Cleveland.com the response was encouraging.

“From the moment Alex finished his talk for the students and staff, the response was overwhelming in terms of excitement and interest,” said Fairview coordinator Grant Graves.

Amanda Messer, another co-founder, said the group wants to make a difference in schools and communities by encouraging students and others to keep promises to help their neighbors in need, and to improve themselves to become better citizens.

“Because I said I would”—which uses the tagline “A promise made. A promise kept.”—launched its pilot project in three schools with strong support from adults in the community.

The first pilot high school chapters will debut at Fairview, Akron’s Buchtel Community Learning Center, and Columbus’ Walnut Ridge High School as a means of developing character in students through service work and positive role models.

“Some students do not receive positive behavior modeling at home at all or not enough,” Messer said. “Whether their parents are fighting their own battles, are uneducated or simply need to work to provide for their family, the truth is that we don’t get everything we need to learn at home.

“Learning English, math and science is incredibly important, but if we’re not educating the next generation to be decent human beings to one another, then what’s the point of it all?”

Graves will select 10 students from each grade to guide and lead each chapter, with the goal of developing Chapter Leadership Teams to handle issues like logistics, fundraising, photo journalism, and communications, Cleveland.com reports.

“We started chapters as a way to create measurable impact on the world through promises,” Messer said. “According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 75 percent of Americans do not volunteer a single hour in a given year.”

Scholar Benjamin Diamond reflected on the foundation of the work of “Because I said I would”—truthfulness—in a column for The Hedgehog Review, a publication of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia.

In the context of UVA’s honor code, Diamond wrote:

A common criticism of honor codes is that integrity ought to be a given. An explicit statement of morality should not be necessary. But UVA’s honor code—in fact, the honor code at any university—is predicated on the belief in students’ essential virtue and that the mission of the university and the individual’s own flourishing are best served when accountability for misconduct rests not with professors but with peers.

By partnering with “Because I said I would,” students in Ohio are learning the value of integrity by taking ownership of keeping their word to help others.

The Jubilee Centre offers the lesson “The Virtue of Truthfulness” for educators who want to challenge their students to develop integrity in and out of the classroom.

Students decide where the money goes

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In Fulton, Illinois each homeroom at River Bend Middle School received $100 to give back to the community. The only catch is that it had to have a personal connection to students.

Since the beginning of the school year, Principal Kathleen Schipper has allocated Wednesdays for working on community projects. She had only one stipulation for the students’ $100 contribution: Make it relatable. She didn’t want the donations to go toward a broad effort. Rather, she wanted a personal connection. The projects were kept secret—even Schipper had no idea what the students were doing.

Donations were made to cancer research and the nearby White Oaks Therapeutic Equestrian Center, which provides programs to the physically and mentally disabled. Two homerooms made fleece blankets for a children’s hospital and the Harbor Crest Nursing Home. Eighth-graders made a blanket for a therapy dog. The Student Council filled boxes with supplies and amenities for new students on their first day of school. A 6th-grade class donated money to the Wounded Warrior Project and shared stories of loved ones in the military.

Some classes became inspired by their peers’ personal tragedies or maladies, donating, for example, to brain tumor awareness.

Teachers report that students seem to have a clear concept of volunteerism and philanthropy. Special Education teacher Connie Hoffman sees the school going forward with community involvement. “This is not a one-shot thing,” she told the Clinton Herald. “Mrs. Schipper would be proud.”

Schools are full of rules, rewards, and consequences. All of these are in place in order to bring children to the place where they freely and willingly choose the good without the need for enticements. Yet sometimes schools neglect to give children this freedom and responsibility.

Principal Kathleen Schipper is nurturing character in her students by providing the opportunity to do good in what Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture founder James Davison Hunter, calls moral autonomy. Hunter explains it this way in The Death of Character: “Character implies the moral autonomy of the individual in his or her capacity to freely make ethical decisions. The reason, very simply, is that controlled behavior cannot be moral behavior for it removes the element of discretion and judgment.”

Teachers can give students this moral autonomy in designing service projects or gifts for the good of the community with this Advisory in Action lesson from Learning to Give.

Suspensions are down in Buffalo, but at what cost?

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“Restorative justice” practices have reduced school suspensions, but also have resulted in unpunished bad behavior, said the president of the Buffalo Teachers Federation. The school superintendent, however, wants to address discipline problems at the “root cause,” and not take students out of class for minor offenses, The Buffalo News reports.

The Buffalo Public Schools, like many districts across the country, has seen a push away from authoritarian discipline in favor of such “restorative” practices as dialogue and mediation. But Buffalo Teachers’ Federation President Philip Rumore said disruptive or even violent students are being sent back to class with few or no consequences. “When you send a student back to class,” he said, “the message goes out to the rest of the class that that behavior is OK.”

School Superintendent Kriner Cash has a different view. “We have a significant challenge with disproportionality here,” Cash said, referring to the high number of minority students who have been suspended.

George Mason University Economist Walter Williams rejects the idea that the racial disparity in suspensions is caused by shortcomings among the teachers rather than disparate behavior among the students.  In a column published earlier this year, Williams cites a March 14 report by Max Eden, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Eden quotes a Buffalo teacher who was kicked in the head by a student. “We have fights here almost every day,” the teacher said, and students taunt the teachers with the words, “We can’t get suspended.”

Williams asks how restorative justice policies that prevent motivated black students from learning, differ from policies that would seek to sabotage black education by making it impossible for schools to remove students who make education impossible for everyone else.

Some argue that punitive discipline systems that disproportionately affect minority students should be challenged and a new, restorative culture, should be built in place of the old, punitive one—a culture that is stronger than mere techniques and training.

Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture founder James Davison Hunter, in his book The Tragedy of Moral Education in America, points to the fact that it is not techniques that are of first importance, but a moral culture. “In such settings, people will not merely acquire techniques of moral improvement but, rather, will find themselves encompassed within a story that defines their own purposes within a shared destiny, one that points toward aims that are higher and greater than themselves.”

Moving away from punitive systems of discipline is hard work culturally. It takes time to reshape the assumptions of teachers and students alike, and failure to lead that cultural transformation will produce frustration. The State of Illinois offers a guide to implementing restorative justice. For school systems that are going to take the long road to restorative practices, it is worth investing the time and energy to do it well.

SRO says social media a danger to youth

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The use of nonstop social media among middle school students, along with illegal drugs and alcohol, represents the major danger to youth, a Connecticut school resource officer said.

Jeff Deak, a New Canaan police officer, told members of the New Canaan Board of Education that warnings from trusted adults about about the pitfalls of marathon social media usage are ineffective. “It doesn’t matter,” he said.  “Those issues, in my opinion—the alcohol, the drugs, and the social media—are the big issues.

School Board Chair Dionna Carlson noted that the district has put time and effort into social-emotional learning. She asked the district’s Crisis Advisory Board representatives at the meeting whether those skills are in any way combined with safety and security training.

South School Principal Joanne Rocco said that the Crisis Advisory Board has discussed “the history of some school shooters and what is missing in their lives and how do we make sure through our School Climate Committee and through the work that we do in our classrooms that we have addressed that.”

Rocco said that all the work the school district has done around emotional intelligence this year is a great starting point, “even though it’s something that we have always addressed through the years.”

Even before the publication of “Has the Smartphone Destroyed a Generation?,” parents and educators have been discussing how to rank social media usage—and phone usage in particular—in students’ health, safety, and learning. The New Canaan school resource officer’s comments to the Board of Education can further push us to action.

While the research is still in process, it is certainly the case that many social media users admit to feeling an addiction.  As Chad Welmon and Julia Ticona have observed in The Hedgehog Review: “Believing that we as individuals are solely responsible for our technology-suffused lives, we risk overlooking the ways in which our individual incapacity to say no to Facebook is a cultural incapacity, one that Facebook is not only keen to exploit but also eager to preserve.”

In other words, it takes more than just individual willpower to overcome social media. It takes the sort of community effort for which Jeff Deak is calling.

In schools that don’t have a school-wide mobile phone policy, teachers often have significant discretion in how to help students to take responsible action with technology. Check out this one.

Wake Forest medical students mentor minority boys

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Medical students are busy people. Wake Forest medical student Kwone Ingram uses some of his precious time to mentor minority boys in a local elementary school and to help place mentors where they are needed through a non-profit he founded.

“I hope they get a better sense of what they can accomplish,” said Ingram, a second-year medical student. He’d like the boys “to receive a feeling of love and that somebody cares about them—that they’re not doing this alone.”

The whole idea is to get someone who looks like them in their life,” and show them there are things they can do that don’t involve basketball or having a microphone in their hands,” Ingram told the Triad Business Journal.

Ingram and his fellow students teach the boys such life skills as tying ties, etiquette, dining habits, healthy eating choices, and accepted patterns of social interaction. Ingram’s program is called Supporting Young Scholars Through Empowerment and Mentorship (SYSTEM).

Growing up in nearby Walkertown, NC, Ingram benefited from the guidance of several mentors. One got him involved with the local fire department as a teenager, where he developed the goal of going into emergency medicine or trauma surgery.

Mentoring plays a crucial role in shaping the habits and dreams of young people. In short, mentors transmit culture and shape character.

The power of mentoring is its impact on what the founder of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, James Davison Hunter,  calls habitus, “the taken for granted assumptions that prevail in a particular society or civilization that make our world seem commonsensical.” In The Death of Character, Hunter writes: “Socialized as children into this habitus, we live with an intuitive feeling about the nature of the world around us. Culture, in this way, becomes so deeply embedded into our subjective consciousness that the ways of the world seem ‘natural’ to us.”

Programs like SYSTEM make it intuitive for African American men to mentor minority boys to show them the skills necessary for success and also to show them that they are cared about. This is how culture is transmitted and character is formed.

SYSTEM is a student-led non-profit service organization in Winston-Salem, NC, made up of current graduate and medical students attending Wake Forest University. If you are thinking about starting or joining a mentoring program, this checklist from the National Mentoring Partnership provides a great starting place.

On this soccer team, soccer is the third priority

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Indy Millennium Soccer players know they are “sons first, students second, and then, players—in that order.” Those priorities have made them among the best in Indiana two years running, WTHR reports.

With club teams a growing business, some cities are pinning their hopes for economic growth on youth sports. But as the stakes go up, more and more young people from low-income families are excluded. “Players’ fees” of up to $6,000 per year are imposed, which doesn’t count the cost of uniforms, equipment, and travel. Private coaching can cost $100 an hour or more.

Indy Millennium is a soccer club that runs nine teams for players from ages 8 though 17 who get experienced coaches and play at an elite level. They don’t have to pay, but they are taught that assists in life are more important than assists on the field. Coaches emphasize character before they even start talking about soccer skills.

Along with being respectful of their families, teachers, coaches, and peers, players must maintain their grades and volunteer at least 10 hours per week to stay on the field. They also learn the importance of teamwork and that no player, no matter how skilled,  can do it alone.

Youth sports are an ideal place for character formation.

Matthew Braswell explains why it’s good to love football (or any sport) in The Hedgehog Review. Quoting Michael Serazino, he says, “. . . if you look hard at sports, you can’t help but see contours of religion.” Braswell continues: “He cited the early sociologist Émile Durkheim, for whom religion was of interest not so much as a body of scripture or doctrines but as a means of social solidarity and common purpose. When people come together to worship, whether the ostensible object of their worship is a religious totem or a battalion of athletes, they are affirming themselves as a community.”

The opportunity for youth sports is to cultivate a community ethos of “sons first, students second, and then, players—in that order.” When passionate athletes who want to win have a goal higher than winning, the common purpose truly serves the community.

Westfield, Indiana has a tremendous asset in the Millennium Soccer program. The Positive Coaching Alliance offers resources for parents, administrators, coaches, and athletes—including former UCLA coach John Wooden’s Pyramid of Success.

Mentorship makes the difference

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A New Jersey middle school student went from getting D’s and F’s to getting A’s with the help of a writing mentor.

David Israel, 13, a student at Helen Fort Middle School in Pemberton, NJ, said he had never done particularly well in the classroom. But recently he’s been able to turn that around with the help of a mentorship program with graduate students at Rider University in Lawrenceville, NJ.

The middle school students and their graduate school mentors communicate through Google Docs, Helen Fort spokeswoman Jeanne Mignella told the Ellwood City Ledger in an email. “This year’s topic was Grit and Resilience, in keeping with the character education theme at the middle school.”

Mentors communicate with up to three students. In addition to help with writing, mentors provide support and advice for other areas of students’ lives. More than 60 middle school students participate in the program.

In December students traveled to Rider University to meet their mentors face-to-face for the first time. Three of the students were chosen to read before the whole group.

Amanda Schott, the language arts teacher who coordinates the program at the middle school, said having someone else besides the teacher look at the students’ writing makes students feel less like they’re being critiqued and more like they’re communicating with a pen pal.

David Israel said the program has helped him gain his confidence and has made him feel good.

Although this mentoring program is focused on writing, intergenerational relationships are key for adolescents as they discern what is worth writing about and what is worth living for. For students who lack other role models in their lives, this sort of mentorship can be transformative.

Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture  Postdoctoral Research Associate Andrew Lynn in his review of Robert Putnam’s Our Kids approvingly noted Putnam’s emphasis on the social capital provided by life-saving relationships that are intergenerational: “A working-class high school quarterback gets to college because a football coach guides him through the application process. A high-achieving but alienated minority high school student finds educational support in an older white woman . . .”

Putnam identified a “mentoring gap” which must be filled by programs like the Rider University writing mentorship program. And, as Lynn observes, even a small number of these relationships can make a difference. It certainly did for David Israel.

If you’re considering serving as a mentor in your community, the National Mentoring Partnership has a clearinghouse to help identify opportunities to serve.

©2017 Advanced Studies in Culture

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