Month: March 2018

Writing club at DC elementary school helps kids narrate life

by

Ketcham Elementary School fourth-grader Arazne Pannell looks forward to Wednesday afternoons, a time when she can unwind with friends as part of the after-school Anthology Club.

“I’ve been in the club for two years and it actually serves as a break from stress for me,” said Pannell, one of about 10 students in the writing club who attends with her third-grade sister Anari. “I love this part of the day on Wednesdays because I get excited when we’re all together writing and having fun.”

The three-year-old Anthology Project at Ketcham is funded through the District of Columbia’s “Excellence through Equity” program, and it’s one of many programs aimed at helping disenfranchised students engage in school, the Washington Informer reports.

The project is designed by founder Ciji Dodds and teacher adviser Sarah Baraba to help students improve academics, particularly literacy skills, through creative writing that focuses on equity, and social and emotional learning. Volunteer educators meet with students in grades two through five, who craft writings around a theme that’s later published in anthologies.

“You can tell the growth of the students just by the quality of their writings over the past two years,” particularly in the politically-themed compilation, ‘Breakthrough,’” Dodds told the news site. “Last year was big time in politics, and we focused on how policies and politics affect students. A lot of our students were concerned, and they were experiencing different feelings, so we wanted to give them an outlet to express that.”

Ten-year-old Ta’Shaun Hunt said she learned a lot about segregation, Black History Month and famous black folks, while fifth-grader Jeremiah Walker said the club has inspired a love of writing and made him more outgoing.

“I really like to write and being in the club helps with my (social) strategies,” he told the Informer. “I can see a lot of improvement.”

Writing club advisers encourage students to reflect on their own experiences and environment with anthologies including “Beyond the Bridge” and “In My Neighborhood,” with focused on the positive aspects of the Anacostia community.

Another anthology, “The Me I wish to Be,” is a freestyle compilation about students’ hopes and dreams.

“On average, we have about 10 student members of the Anthology Project,” Baraba said. “We usually refer to them as the actual authors, although we sometimes fall for contributing students who just want to submit their stories to the anthology.”

In narrating their own stories, the stories of their neighborhood, and their aspirations for themselves, the Ketcham students are doing the foundational work of building character.

James Davison Hunter, founder of University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, connects the dots between story and character in The Tragedy of Moral Education in America:

Implicit in the word character is a story. It is a story about living for a purpose that is greater than the self. Though this purpose resides deeply within, its origins are outside the self, and so it beckons one forward, channeling one’s passions to mostly quiet acts of devotion, heroism, sacrifice, and achievement.

The Anthology Project draws students into the big questions of who they are, where they are going, and how policies will impact their lives – the essential questions of character.

Inspiring students to write often begins with providing them with something beautiful to read and imitate. The Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues offers a starting point with the lesson Virtue, Vice, and Verse.

Houston teacher traces inspiration to family and community

by

Reflecting on Black History Month, Shontoria Walker says, “my schoolhouse was my family” and that this community inspired her. Now, as an English teacher at KIPP Polaris Academy for Boys, she is inspiring the next generation of students.

Shontoria Walker had teachers who looked like her—as did the business owners, doctors, councilwomen, and writers who visited the school. “I was shown what success could look like in the future,” she says. Yet it wasn’t just professional success that was modeled; it was “character and life skills,” she says. “In this schoolhouse, I learned perseverance, resilience, kindness, accountability and, most importantly, confidence.”

In a commentary that appeared in educationpost.org, Walker stressed that expectations in her elementary school were high, and excellence was demanded.

She recalled that there was a library in the barbershop across the street where she and her fellow students read books that inspired them as they worked on their homework while waiting for their parents. “We picked pecans from the neighborhood trees and nearby grass lots,” she wrote, “and conducted field lessons in the trails and pathways outside of the school building.”

The visits of prominent black professionals to the classroom “fed our imaginations,” Walker wrote. She was told that she could be whatever she wanted to be and was given living examples. She expressed sadness that because of financial hardships and low enrollment, Robert C. Chatham Elementary School—which for so long had nurtured children like Walker—closed in 2007.

Walker’s experience is consistent with the findings of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture’s School Culture and Student Formation Project, published in The Content of Their Character: “What these case studies also consistently show is the importance of the informal articulation of a moral culture through the example of teachers and other adults in the school community. The moral example of teachers unquestionably complemented the formal instruction students received, but arguably, it was far more poignant to, and influential upon, the students themselves. Certainly, this was the impression in the trenches.”

Certainly, that was Walker’s experience. It was also the experience of Eric Motley.

Eric Motley grew up in Madison Park, Alabama. In this beautiful essay, he describes a cultural world like the one that shaped Walker in her childhood. The essay, and Madison Park, A Place of Hope from which it is excerpted, provide outstanding primary source material for secondary teachers to show students the hope that Motley and Walker experienced as children.

Tributes pour in for Aaron Feis, who shielded students during Florida massacre

by

Some folks believe Aaron Feis embodied “love in its purest form.”

Others described the assistant football coach at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School as a “gentle giant,” and “a humble, sweet person who loved his school and would do anything for the kids,” the Miami Herald reports.

Hundreds of students, family, community members, and public officials attended a funeral service last month to honor the 37-year-old fixture at Stoneman Douglas who selfishly shielded students from gunfire during the recent deadly school shooting in Parkland, Florida.

Feis, a 1999 Stoneman Douglas graduate, started work at the school as a custodian, and was later promoted to security guard. A physically imposing man, with a bald head and fiery red beard, Feis patrolled the school grounds in a golf cart, greeting the school’s 3,200 students as they arrived and departed each day, the Herald reports.

But Feis’s appearance belied his tender and loyal nature, and many students and others at his service reflected on how he impacted their lives well before the February 14 shooting that ended his life, and the lives of 16 other students and staff.

Witnesses report Feis bolted toward the gunfire and draped himself over two students to act as a human shield during the melee, a final selfless act many said defined his selfless character.

“Coach Feis was more than just my coach or a security guard, because I saw him more than I saw my own parents every day,” Stoneman Douglas grad Johnathan Sevog told the Herald. “I’d see him from 8 a.m. till 9, 9:30 p.m. every day and he was such a mentor and even father figure for me cause he just taught me so much.”

“It was so tragic losing him because I know how good of a man he was and I know how much he did for everybody, not only me,” he said. “He was honestly something special. It may not seem like he did much, because he was just a security guard and football coach, but he touched more lives . . . than most people do in their whole life.”

Elliott Bonner, a Stoneman Douglas coach and security guard who worked with Feis for years, said “he knew he was making a difference.”

“He was like a life coach,” he said. “We tried to teach kids about life after Douglas, life in the real world.”

Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel also shared his experience coaching alongside Feis while his sons attended Stoneman Douglas.

“Head coaches have come and gone but what’s the one constant? Big Feis. Kids would do more for Feis because they never wanted to let him down,” Israel said.

Student Brandon Corona told the Herald that Feis spent countless hours creating highlight videos for players and sending them to colleges, driving the bus for several sports, and giving kids rides home.

When Feis cut Corona from the JV football team, he was “embarrassed and hurt,” but Feis “took me aside and said, ‘I don’t see that you believe in yourself yet, but when you do you’ll be starting for me next year,’” Corona said.  “He had a vision for me that I didn’t have,” Corona said.

Custodians, security guards, assistant football coaches, and other school staff are often overlooked in the role that they play in inspiring and forming strong character in students, but research from the School Cultures and Student Formation Project shows it can be significant.

Researchers working with the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture examined the dynamic in a wide variety of American high schools and published the findings in The Content of Their Character.

“What these case studies . . . consistently show is the importance of the informal articulation of a moral culture through the example of teachers and other adults in the school community,” editors James Davison Hunter and Ryan S. Olson wrote. “As a rule, students want their teachers to think well of them and respect them, and they recognize teachers as role models as they do other adults, such as coaches, administrators, and parents.”

On February 14, Feis transformed his role from respected mentor to hero with what one mourner described as an “act of bravery toward the students who saw evil in its purest form and then saw love in its purest form from Mr. Feis.”

“Aaron Feis has been a hero to many people for a long time,” former coach Mike Verden said at the recent service. “The beauty of Feb. 14 is how the world gets to know him.”

Creative discipline helps states meet ESSA performance targets

by

A middle school in Texas takes an unconventional approach to dealing with theft that might help other schools improve school climate and outcomes for students.

NEA Today spoke with William Sheets, Restorative Practices Coordinator for the Dallas Independent School District, to learn more about restorative practices and hear how the district has moved forward with their implementation.  Sheets says that restorative practices are fundamentally about “being proactive in the classroom, investing time into your students and really listening to them.” Ideally, this serves to improve school culture and better support those students who may be facing challenges.

Under the umbrella of restorative practices, schools seek to avoid suspending students who have broken school rules, unless a major infraction has been committed, and instead will use community-building exercises to restore justice and address any harm caused.

The process relies on “classroom circling” to both build a culture where issues can be truly addressed in this manner and, in some cases, to solve incidents in real time. Classroom circling plays out very similarly to how it sounds: all students in a class gather in a circle to discuss what might have happened and each participant is guaranteed a chance to speak.

NEA Today adds that, “At Medrano Middle School, there are planned circles at least once every six weeks for relationship building, but more will take place when an issue needs to be addressed. In relationship building circles, kids are asked a variety of questions, about favorite music or movies, for example, or what what they’d like to see changed at school.”

The district is piloting restorative practices in six elementary and middle schools, and based on the positive preliminary results, they plan to expand to more schools in the future. In-school suspensions dropped by 70%, and out-of-school suspensions plummeted by 77%.

No teacher in any of the pilot schools is required to adopt the practices in their classroom. However, as teachers witnessed the effectiveness of this relational approach, they have opted to participate. It seems that as educators saw how the process could address the root cause of student misbehavior instead of only providing short-term consequences, they decided it was worth incorporating

Now schools around the nation are looking for practices like this that can improve school climate and drive student outcomes required by the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA).

Dallas is just one district of many across the country who are adopting restorative practices, and this could be a key step to meeting school climate goals laid out in the state’s ESSA plans.

Practices like the ones in Dallas are promising because of the ways that they help students take responsibility for their actions. This is critical, argues Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture founder James Davison Hunter in The Death of Character, because “character implies the moral autonomy of the individual in his or her capacity to freely make ethical decisions.” If you suspend a student for theft, you have punished, but you haven’t called on them to make take responsible action to repair the harm. Hunter explains that “controlled behavior cannot be moral behavior for it removes the element of discretion and judgment.”

Establishing moral autonomy for teachers and students in schools is hard, slow work where suspension is the default action for moral transgression. Duke Law offers schools a framework of alternative strategies that can establish the kind of culture where students take responsibility for their actions in the classroom, and in life.

One middle school brings parents to school in place of suspension

by

As school administrators grapple with how to establish school discipline, and avoid excessive use of suspensions, Donaldson Middle School in Louisiana takes an approach that motivates students and parents.

In the fall of 2016 administrators at Donaldson were facing rising suspension numbers and an increasing sense that they weren’t helping the students who needed the most support, reports The Advocate. Assistant Principal Paul Sampson happened upon a solution that he brought to his colleagues: “reverse suspensions.” Essentially, if you’re a kid who is frustrated by school and would rather not be there anyway, suspensions aren’t so bad. Act up, go home for a couple of days, and then come back to school and do the same. A reverse suspension flips this paradigm. When a student doesn’t meet Donaldson’s behavior expectations, administrators contact the parents, who must shift their schedules to come in and spend a large portion of time in class with the student.

“Instead of sending them home with mom and dad, mom and dad come to school with them,” summarized Principal Daryl Comery. The school expected parents to be frustrated with the extra burden, but anecdotal evidence points to the contrary.

Devin Wright, a math teacher, speaking to local news station KLFY, said: “Sometimes, there was a sense of maybe we’re attacking the child or maybe we don’t have the best interest of that child . . . When they see us being intentional about redirecting them and giving them those chances, parents really were able to buy in.” Comery backed this up, saying, “Our parents are our biggest advocates. They’re on our side.” He also added that the new suspensions are an effective deterrent as middle school students are particularly averse to their parents spending time with them in class.

The reverse suspensions were piloted in the 2016–2017 school year, and have been fully implemented this year. “Suspensions fell from 247 at the end of the 2016 fall semester to 156 at the end of the 2017 fall semester,” The Advocate reported.

The approach hasn’t always been easy. It can be difficult to match up parents’ schedules, and sometimes the school has had to figure out a transportation solution, but going the extra mile has strengthened the bonds between Donaldson and its parents.

The School Cultures and Student Formation Project of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture reports in The Content of Their Character that strengthening connections between school and home is important, not just for addressing behavior problems, but also for the long work of building character. Editors James Davison Hunter and Ryan S. Olson write, “There is considerable evidence that strong social support contributes crucially, if not decisively, to [students’] success in school, whether that support comes from parents and family, youth organizations, or religious communities. The thickness of social ties also bears positively on the formation of a stable self-identity and, by extension, a child’s moral character.”

Where those social ties don’t exist, or have broken down, a well-implemented reverse suspension program may help—but not because it is punitive to the parent or child. Wright’s comments on parent buy-in, when they see first-hand the lengths to which the school is going to support their child, echo this.

Assistant Principal Paul Sampson highlighted that after the school instituted its reverse suspensions, “we expected the parents to be upset with us, but actually, they were upset with the kids. We don’t have many repeats.”

Researchers at the Duke Center for Child and Family Policy and Duke Law School have published a guide, “Instead of Suspension: Alternative Strategies for Effective School Discipline,” for administrators looking for ways to avoid a zero-tolerance approach to school discipline.

Montessori students think globally through model UN

by

A dozen students from Jacksonville, North Carolina’s Montessori Children’s School recently trekked to New York City to present their research on the world’s problems and negotiate solutions with students representing different countries, an experience that offered lessons in both civics and character.

The 4th- through 6th-grade students served as delegates for Israel, Algeria, and Monaco at the Montessori Model United Nations (MMUN) New York Conference in late February, when they convened with students from across the globe to discuss issues like poverty, sustainable development, international security, and others, The Daily News reports.

Preparation began months before, with students researching the culture and pressing issues of their assigned countries, and crafting presentations and solutions for negotiation at the MMUN.

Student delegates followed the UN structure and procedures to navigate committees, where they worked to draft resolutions that they later voted on during a mock General Assembly at the actual UN in New York.

“Karalyn Marsh and Caleb Conklin, . . . fifth graders representing Israel, have found world issues are also complex ones,” The Daily News reports. “Karalyn’s research on the rights of indigenous people has included the topic of the Israel-Palestine conflict while Caleb is ready to discuss the Chemical Weapons Convention.”

The Montessori Children’s School representatives for Algeria focused on the country’s issues with military spending, poverty, and health care.

“They are spending a lot of money on the military and people are suffering and don’t have health care, food and basic essentials,” 4th-grader Grace Mayer told The Daily News.

The school’s MMUN coordinator, April Kennedy, described the conference and preparation as a global education with a real-life experience—one that’s been “eye opening” for many students studying problems like poverty and war.

“Preparing for the conference they’ve had to put themselves in others’ shoes and it has helped to broaden their perspective,” she said.

The MMUN is part of a tradition of cultivating global citizenship that is fraught with complexity.

Jeffrey Dill, a scholar at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture wrote in The Longings and Limits of Global Citizenship:

Schooling is the context in which society tells stories about itself . . . Education has the goal of creating a certain kind of person—a character in a story—with the values, characteristics, and skills a particular society holds as ideals.

Montessori education in general, and the MMUN in particular, tell an important and specific story.

Montessori education is based on assumptions about the nature of persons, and how they learn. And the MMUN places students as characters in a global story in which they need both skills and virtues to understand a problem, take another perspective, and work constructively with others. The Montessori community is a particular society, with unique practices that sustain a vision of their ideals of civic engagement.

The MMUN has a thoughtful preparation process that ensures the model UN experience is more than a fun field trip. The process sets a strong foundation with classroom lessons and after-school programs many months before the students arrive at the UN.

High school teaches social emotional skills

by

Hinsdale High School District 86 in Illinois is showing high-schoolers how to identify and measure their emotions, in hopes that the social and emotional skills can help them balance life and focus in school.  The district recently adopted the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence’s “RULER” approach—an acronym that stands for recognizing, understanding, labeling, expressing, and regulating emotions.

Yale officials held a workshop with Hinsdale South High School staff at the beginning of the school year, and planned social and emotional learning is now required as part of physical education for all freshmen, the Chicago Tribune reports.

A key to the program is a “mood meter” to help students better identify their emotional state.

According to the Tribune:

The upper right quadrant is yellow and describes when someone is energetic and in a good mood. The lower right quadrant is green and with words such as tranquil, content, chill and secure, describes when someone is feeling good, but not very energetic.

The lower left quadrant is blue, representing when someone is disgusted, alienated, disappointed, bored or ashamed. The upper left quadrant is red, with words such as furious, frustrated, shocked, nervous and annoyed, describing someone who is feeling both unpleasant and high energy.

Teachers of all subjects are receiving training, and are incorporating social and emotional skills into other daily lessons, as well.

Math teacher Gina Gagliano, for example, offers extra credit to students who use the mood meter phone app to record their mood at three different times throughout the day for about two months, and analyze patterns.

Both students and teachers were skeptical about the lessons at first, but several students said they learned more about themselves than they expected.  “At first I thought it was kind of dumb,” freshman Lilly O’Donnell told the Tribune. “I thought, ‘I don’t want to talk about my feelings.’ But I learned ways you could deal with your emotions.”

Fellow freshman Nola Colakovic agreed.  “I didn’t think we really needed it,” she said. “I thought I knew how to handle what I was feeling. But as it went on, I learned there were better ways.” Instead of getting sassy when she’s annoyed, Colakovic said she’s learned to take a moment to think before she reacts.  “That actually helped,” she said.

Hinsdale’s focus on social-emotional learning underscores the reality that schools are formative institutions, with a mission that extends far beyond academics.

James Davison Hunter and Ryan S. Olson, with the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, write in The Content of Their Character:

Human beings, after all, are not merely cerebral, but sentient; not merely rational, but feeling—and beyond the intellectual and emotional, they are social and normative beings, too.

The Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues helps teachers and students with those questions through building compassion for others. By connecting emotions, choices, and actions, the Jubilee Centre materials push students beyond skills and toward the virtue of compassion.

Dr. James Bushman, University High School: The core of school culture

by

Dr. James Bushman, the principal of University High School in Fresno, California, had a problem. He had a thriving school culture, but the school was poised to grow dramatically in ways that could undermine its intimacy and stability. Dr. Bushman chose to intentionally engage faculty and students in defining and transmitting school culture and had the privilege of planning the physical design of the building, and the results were remarkable.

 

Ohio school to start International Baccalaureate program

by
Claire Foltz is excited that multiple-choice tests are becoming somewhat passé at Glen Oak High School in Ohio. Foltz and her classmates will soon be able to enroll in International Baccalaureate (IB) classes, which aim “to develop lifelong learners who think globally and act locally to create a better and more peaceful world,” reports CantonRep.com.
Glen Oak High School has gone through a three-year process of preparing to become an IB school because of the way that it forms and shapes learners and citizens. The school is only one of 22 in Ohio that offer the program, and part of an international community of 2,500 IB schools.
CantonRep.com says that the main difference between IB and traditional classes revolves around the methods through which students are “demonstrating knowledge.” Traditional classes frequently rely on students regurgitating information to determine whether they’ve reached a certain level of mastery. IB classes ask students to go deeper, researching topics and applying that learning to their local community.
At Glen Oak, the IB classes will allow students to demonstrate knowledge through oral presentations, large research papers, and completion of community service projects. Foltz described her excitement with the transition: ““I like to be able to explain myself and I like presentations . . . so I think it’s going to be a lot more effective for me. I think it’s a good change.”
Classes will be offered across the spectrum of academic content, including: “varying levels of English, French and Spanish, global politics, biology and physics and varying levels of math, music and visual arts.”
Administrators at Glen Oak are excited about the benefits that IB classes will have for students beyond their time in the classroom. Emily Palmer, the program’s coordinator, feels that by exposing students to a more robust learning process they are better prepared to become lifelong learners. She said the goal is to have students, “believe in the heart of IB, which is to create a better world.”
In The Content of Their Character, Notre Dame sociologist David Sikkink describes the IB model as “built on a broad and demanding liberal arts curriculum that includes ‘language acquisition’ and study of ‘individuals and societies,’ both of which help encourage an awareness of cultures worldwide. The program also requires the completion of an independent research essay and a service project.”
The IB model provides coherence for the work of a school beyond granting diplomas. Through its required capstone project, students must build the skills of independent inquiry. Sikkink says that the IB students studied in the School Cultures and Student Formation Project at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture had to “be experts at managing their own time, since they were urged to maintain high academic performance in a very rigorous program.” The required service project can form dispositions of social concern that extend beyond the school walls.
Glen Oak anticipates that the IB program will draw families and students that are committed to this model of learning and service. Already, they have students and families who are excited about pursuing the character and skills outlined in the IB learner profile.
The IB learner profile is helpful to educators in defining the qualities that they seek in their students—and then matching their curriculum and pedagogy to those goals.  It is also useful in helping a school determine whether it should offer the IB program.

Jewish school brings summer camp to class

by

The Jewish Community Day School in Watertown, MA, incorporates camp-like overnight trips as part of its Jewish environmental education curriculum. That is part of a broader push toward experiential learning and character formation.

According to University of Miami demographer Ira Sheskin, “Adults who had a Jewish overnight camp experience as children are significantly more likely to exhibit Jewish behaviors as adults.”

The experiential nature of summer camp is part of what makes it so deeply formative rather than merely educational. That’s the aim of the Jewish Community Day School. Oren Kaunfer, a former MTV producer turned spiritual educator, says, “When trying to describe my job, I do often say, ‘I bring camp to school.'”

“Everyone is sitting on the ground,” Kaunfer said. “It’s got a camp feel to it. It’s taking Jewish experiences and making them more memorable and exciting and deepening them.”

Ira Stoll, reporting for the Jewish Journal, wrote that the trend of Jewish schools trying to integrate the positive elements of camp life into the school year, without sacrificing academic rigor, “mirrors what’s going on in American education overall.” This involves an emphasis on informal, experiential, project-based learning rather than lectures, worksheets, and drills. The thinking goes that this approach will better prepare students to be lifelong learners in the global economy and the internet age.

The key, said Sheshkin, is to bring camp elements into the classroom in a way that enhances the school’s Judaic and academic rigor.

The practices of a school are critical to students “catching” the character of the school, write James Davison Hunter and Ryan S. Olson in The Content of Their Character, which summarizes the findings of the School Cultures and Student Formation project from the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. In the schools studied—including Jewish day schools—they conclude, “The moral and missional ethos of a school was reinforced through a range of practices, or routinized actions—some formal, some informal—all oriented toward giving tangible expression to the school’s values and beliefs.”

The experiential nature of summer-camp-like activities are ideal for giving expression to the school’s values and beliefs—and making those values stick. “It’s taking Jewish experiences and making them more memorable and exciting and deepening them,” says Kaunfer.

Making formative learning experiences memorable is critical for schools interested in character formation. For schools that can’t do overnight experiences, project-based learning is one way to strengthen the formative practices of a school.

©2017 Advanced Studies in Culture

Facebook Twitter Linkedin