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.
Irving Middle School’s “Kind Cougars” are highlighting important character virtues in a series of “virtue of the month” videos to encourage classmates to be kind and thoughtful toward one another.
Norman, Oklahoma, students Sutton Willis, Nora Morrow, Aliriah Barrett, and Eva Condon offered examples of perseverance in a January video, and discussed why it’s an important element of success.
“A great way to show perseverance is realizing you can push through the tough times and never give up,” Sutton said.
“ . . . If you have a divorce in your family, or you had a death, or you got a bad grade on a test, by pushing through it and never giving up, that’s showing perseverance,” Barrett added.
The virtue video project is an example of the kind of noncognitive learning that the Institute of Advanced Studies in Culture’s James Davison Hunter and Ryan Olson deem “essential” in The Content of Their Character, a summary of research into character formation in a variety of schools.
To be sure, a considerable and consistent effort has been made to address the so-called “noncognitive” aspects of child development. By “noncognitive,” scholars and educators tend to mean the attitudes, behaviors, and strategies that are believed also to underpin success in school and at work—capacities such as self-motivation, perseverance, and self-control, but also empathy, honesty, truthfulness, and character more broadly. And surely the instinct is a good one: For children to flourish in schools and in their future lives, it is essential that these dimensions of their lives be developed too.
The Kind Cougars video is part of an initiative with the Institute for the Study of Human Flourishing at the University of Oklahoma, which offers further reading on perseverance and why it’s especially important for students.
Mentor Public Schools in Ohio are using a unique approach to bullying and mentorship as part of a nationwide program in partnership with the nonprofit Stick Together, and companies Duct Tape and Avon.
The program—which includes 50,000 students in 15 states—encourages high schoolers to teach kids in grades 2 through 6 about the harmful effects of bullying, and how they can stick together to promote kindness instead, WKYC reports.
“It is a powerful message for our younger students to hear about the importance of kindness and acceptance of others from high school students, rather than just hearing it from adults,” district spokeswoman Kristen Kirby said.
Former local news personality Danielle Serino, who serves as Stick Together’s national ambassador, discussed the program on WKYC’s “Donovan Live.” “In 97 percent of the cases, the schools tell us, 97 percent of the students are kinder to one another, bullying is reduced, and the graduation rates increase,” she said. “So it’s a win-win.”
Serino believes the program is helping at an opportune time, “especially nowadays with social media, and the pressures these kids are facing.”
“Suicides are on the increase . . . so it really helps these kids,” she said.
Mentor High School guidance counselor Marc Nemunaitis said students in MHS’ bullying prevention program are leading the discussions locally, and he believes it will have a significant impact on both the younger and older students who participate. High school students typically lead 45–50-minute discussions on bullying and kindness, and encourage younger students to sign onto a pledge banner to treat each other with respect.
“One of the target areas we’ve noticed is in the middle schools, when bullying happens, and so hitting them before that hopefully they will go to the middle school and bring a good message and help change the culture of the school,” he said.
“The kids (high schoolers) do all of the program, I don’t do anything. I am just behind the scenes. They have two main speakers and four or five other students who help facilitate the program as we go along,” Nemaunaitis said. “The best part is when high school kids talk to elementary kids, the elementary kids are going to listen. But it has dual reasons, because the high school kids get a lot out of it too.”
Research conducted by the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture shows the dynamic rings true in many schools.
The Institute’s James Davison Hunter and Ryan S. Olson write in The Content of Their Character, which summarizes research in ten sectors of American education, emphasize the importance of “school practices” in shaping students:
How a school is organized, the course structure and classroom practices, the relationship between school and outside civic institutions—all of these matter in the moral and civic formation of the child.
The Stick Together program, is an initiative developed by Values-in-Action Foundation’s Project Love that leverages the collaboration of multiple schools, businesses, and a non-profit to strengthen the school practices, which has the potential to strengthen local communities, as well.
Since 2016, Stick Together has trained over 70,000 K-8 grade students in 55 Ohio counties in over 200 schools to push back against bullying.
Community School for Social Justice founder Sue-Ann Rosch discussed how administrators at the South Bronx school help students take responsibility for their actions with peer mediation during an Education Leaders Roundtable at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture this spring.
“. . . Peer meditations are led by two students from the peer mediation class, and by the social worker who teaches that class, and sometimes it’s just led by the two students without the adults if we feel they have the capacity to do that,” Rosch said, adding that the student mediators also conduct a crucial follow up with their peers to make sure issues are resolved.
The Community School for Social Justice publishes its restorative justice policies and practices on its website, in full transparency for the school and community, and as a resource for others looking to implement their own restorative justice practices.
Sue-Ann Rosch founded the Community School for Social Justice in the South Bronx, where administrators used advisory groups to craft a Restorative Justice Model for student discipline and address rising student suspensions and chronic absences in a violent inner-city neighborhood.
Rosch discussed how the advisory groups helped to shape the core values that drive the school’s restorative justice work during an Education Leaders Roundtable at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture in March.
“We ended up with four community values that we live by . . . one—respect, two—supportive community, three—everyone has a voice, and four—social justice.”
The Community School for Social Justice includes information on its approach to restorative justice on its website.
Sue-Ann Rosch, founder of the Community School for Social Justice in the South Bronx, detailed the rampant school discipline problems that prompted a shift to a Restorative Justice approach during an Education Leaders Roundtable at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture in March.
“There was a frightening amount of suspensions during our 2014-15 school year, there were . . . 113 in total,” she said. “In addition, we started to see a trend of parents coming to the school to initiate fights in the school neighborhood if they felt their child had been wronged.”
EdWeek offers tips on how to implement restorative justice practices in schools.
Sue-Ann Rosch, founder of the Community School for Social Justice in the South Bronx, explained how a Restorative Justice Model for student discipline helps her students resist their often violent reality to focus on academics—a story she calls “a work in progress.”
At the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture’s Education Leaders Roundtable in March, Rosch discussed the interventions and strategies educators used to address rampant discipline problems and chronic absenteeism in an unforgiving inner-city neighborhood, and the positive impact they’re having on students in and out of the classroom.
“How do you get students to de-escalate or to buy into resolving things peacefully when they’re fighting to survive in their neighborhood?” Rosch questioned. “That’s the norm, and their families are often telling them that that is the right thing to do.”
New York Times columnist David Brooks spoke at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture’s Education Leaders Roundtable in March about why words matter in character education, while also acknowledging that “there’s shortcomings to words, even in the teaching business.”
“When I think back on my teachers, I really don’t remember what they said, but I remember how they were, and how they were regarded,” Brooks said.
David Brooks, columnist for The New York Times, talked about how technology and social media contribute to a “crisis of attention” in March during a School Leaders Roundtable hosted by the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia.
“The crisis of attention is a crisis for me, and certainly for students,” Brooks said. “One study in Britain found the average teenager checked their cell phone 221 times a day, every 4.3 minutes.”
Educators and parents can guide students’ engagement with mobile technology through a lesson on “using technology more wisely” from the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues.
David Brooks, columnist for The New York Times, discussed life in the context of a high school cafeteria at a School Leaders Roundtable at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture in March 2017. The event featured dozens of leaders from 10 different sectors of education converging to discuss character formation in schools.
“I think of all of life as basically the high school cafeteria, writ large, and the search for identity,” Brooks said. “When I was in high school, most of my mental energy went to the cafeteria, and maybe 15 percent to the classroom, because I’m trying to figure out who the heck I am and that’s in the cafeteria.”
