mentor

Learning to lead in middle school

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Officials at Riverside School in Lyndonville, Vermont, believe one of the best ways for students to learn is to lead, and they’re expanding a school advisory program to give students more opportunities to mentor younger students. Sixth-graders develop presentations and other materials to help 5th-graders transition to the middle school, while 7th- and 8th-graders talk with elementary students about issues like bullying, exclusion, and personal space, the Caledonian Record reports.

“The Riverside community fully understands that leadership is a skill,” said Head of School Michelle Ralston. “Developing skills takes time. Development takes patience. Our young students begin early and can plan on hard work, many tests of patience, but lots of support from the entire Riverside Community.”

School officials recently worked with clinical therapist Ellen Moore to develop several new learning and leadership opportunities as part of “Riverside Pride,” an expansion of the school’s advisory program. The aim is to help students gain leadership experience throughout their time at Riverside, with the ultimate goal of developing stronger problem solving, leadership, and collaboration among students across grade levels.

Eighth-graders lead groups of six to eight students of varying ages in “Buddy Families,” meeting weekly to perform community services and help maintain the school’s campus. They also plan the Riverside’s morning assembly with themes to engage their classmates on important topics and announcements. The older students lead activities for youngsters for the school’s annual Mythology Day, as well, and visit elementary classrooms to talk about bullying and respect, according to the news site. “We all know that younger students listen to and look up to their older schoolmates. We also know that students learn best when they teach,” Ralston said. “This will be a learning experience for our seventh and eighth graders as well.”

The evolving leadership experiences work in conjunction with the advisory program, which begins in 6th grade with weekly meetings focused on study skills and habits of mind. In 7th grade, the focus shifts to critical skills and dispositions for collaborating in groups.

By 8th grade, students learn to lead the broader school community, capping off their experience with a final presentation to the entire student body. Eighth-graders also gain experience teaching younger classmates during the final weeks of school, under the watchful eye of teachers. “Riverside eighth-graders benefit from years of practicing patient leadership, assisting and mentoring their peers,” Ralston said. “Working together with the school’s mission, the commitment of faculty and staff, and the Riverside Advisory Program, the Riverside Pride initiative will serve to create and value a school-wide environment that fosters integrity and kindness towards one another.”

The Riverside School is building character in its students by consistently giving them the responsibility to lead. They use the language of “dispositions” that are built by “habits.” This sets them apart from many character education initiatives that focus merely on mental recall of character strengths, recognition of one’s own character strengths, or a virtue of the month. By force of habit, they are “assisting and mentoring their peers.”

Education researcher Kathryn Wiens studied prestigious independent schools for the Institute for Advance Studies in Culture’s School Cultures and Student Formation project and found that, ironically, parents can pose a challenge in teaching character. “These parents almost appeared to view the development of character as a nice accessory to the other benefits of a prestigious education,” Wiens wrote.

With the exception of two schools studied, Wiens reported that “a majority of students interviewed at each school suggested that their school did not ultimately care what kind of person they became. Instead, they felt the school was most concerned about their academic achievement and where they went to college.” Wiens’ full research is available as a chapter in The Content of Their Character, which is available for preorder now.

The Riverside School, like other independent schools, faces similar issues, which makes its work weaving character formation and leadership development into the habits and practices of students all the more admirable.

Getting Smart author Tom Vander Ark argues that, “Advisory has to be the spine of the next generation high school,” and offers guidance on how to structure and sustain an advisory program that “really is the glue that holds it all together.”

Wisconsin K3-12 Montessori school builds community

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A Milwaukee public Montessori school’s multi-age classrooms—and one-building K3-12 approach—is creating a unique learning community that allows older students to mentor their younger classmates.

MacDowell Montessori School Principal Andrea Corona told the Shepherd Express that MacDowell started in 1976 as the first public Montessori elementary school in the state. She discussed how a decision to expand to a charter high school in 2006, and merge it with the elementary school in 2012, is building a stronger learning community.

“The nice part about being a K-12 school is we have a prime opportunity for vertical alignment of our curriculum. We’re all here in the same building and we can talk,” Corona said.

“It gives you the opportunity to build community in a way that most schools don’t have. Some of the students that are graduating this year were here since they were 3 years old, and that’s really special . . . We try to build opportunities for them to be leaders and for them to showcase their skills,” she said.

Corona explained that the school is structured based on Montessori founder Maria Montessori’s focus on the three-year developmental plans, with students with the same teacher for three years to build consistency, community, and leadership skills.

“For example, in our K3 through K5 classroom, the K5s are the stewards of the environment and the community,” Conora said. “The younger students have to ask them for help and guidance. Each time students transition to a new developmental level, they get to work to become leaders again.”

The community building extends well beyond the classroom, as well.

“For example, last year, two of our varsity boys basketball players coached the elementary basketball team,” Cornoa told the Shepherd Express. “We also give older students opportunities to work as tutors with the elementary level students; and we have a Big Brothers-Big Sisters program.”

The principal said the Montessori curriculum requires students to work independently and in small groups, while encouraging them to take control of their own learning.

“For example, if I’m giving you a lesson about currents in the ocean, you may get extraordinarily interested in the science of currents, you may get interested in the doldrums and how ships used to get trapped for months, and you might start researching historical stories about how that happened. Each individual student has the opportunity to follow their interest and explore content in a way that’s most meaningful for them,” Corona said.

The approach, combined with traditional offerings like the International Bachelorette program and partnerships with local arts and science groups, is leading to impressive academic results at the small school.

“Two years ago, we were recognized for academic rigor by The Washington Post,” Corona said. “We were really pleased to be ranked number 27 in the state of Wisconsin for academic outcomes—especially considering that we graduated a class of 32 students that year, and we don’t have an admissions requirement. We just couldn’t believe it. We felt like the Little Engine that Could.”

MacDowell Montessori is a prime example of successful pedagogical schools that use strong traditions and a focused vision to guide students.

David Sikkink, a professor of sociology at the University of Notre Dame and lead researcher of pedagogical schools for the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture’s School Cultures and Student Formation Project explains the impact on teachers and students in the book The Content of Their Character:

[O]ften teachers were viewed as custodians of the moral tradition of the school and its place in a larger movement, as journeymen in the daily playing out of the school society. Students entered not only the school doors but the larger traditions in which the school organization was given meaning and direction.

At MacDowell, students are living a tradition of developing deep content knowledge while actively mentoring younger classmates.

Skikkink’s research into character and citizenship formation in pedagogical schools is featured in the new book The Content of Their Character, available in February. The Content of Their Character, which also highlights research into nine other sectors of American high schools, is currently available for pre-order at a discount.

Mentoring program connects middle schoolers and kindergarteners

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Students at Fort Worth, Texas’ Our Lady of Victory Catholic School are more than classmates. They’re family.

A “Faith Family” project launched by principal Samantha Weakland last school year is drawing students together across grade levels, and it’s creating a stronger community by encouraging bonds that extend beyond the typical circle of family and friends.

Weakland told the Centre Daily Times she came up with the idea to group students—two from each of grade at the K-8 school—into Faith Families during a conversation with a family last year, and it’s working wonders to bolster Our Lady of Victory’s mission to educate the whole student.

Students remain with their Faith Families throughout their time at the school, with older students helping to mentor youngsters, she said.

“This builds community across all grade levels and further increases the family atmosphere. Students get to know each other beyond their grade, and interact and learn from them,” Weakland said. “Often times, younger students need a little more support or guidance; a middle school student from their Faith Family may be asked to talk to them. Hearing from an older student makes a big impact.”

The Faith Families meet once a month for team building, prayer services, service work, and athletic events, according to the news site.

Kristy Urgo, parent of an OLV kindergartener, is a big fan of the program.

“My son Ty loves being with the older kids,” she said. “They make him feel so special and treat him so well.”

Kindergarten teacher Jessica Hauser agreed that “having (older) students around the school that they know makes them feel more comfortable and happy (at school).”

“My children all love Faith Families,” Kelly Kurpeikis, mother of four OLV students, told the Centre Daily. “It is a wonderful thing to have a cross-section of ages working together and building relationships throughout their time at OLV.”

Those relationships, Weakland said, are critical to creating a connected community at OLV, and to help students to build strong character virtues they’ll need in life once they leave.

“A positive school climate is essential to the success of a school,” she said. “When all stakeholders feel connected and part of a family then great things can happen.

“At OLV, we want the students to know that they are unique and special and that they should work together to make our classes, our school, our community, and our world a better place,” Weakland said.

In his book The Death of Character, James Davison Hunter, founder of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia, points out that communities with a shared source of authority and strong rituals are fundamental for developing character.

“Mortality is always situated—historically situated within distinct communities, and culturally situated within particular structures of moral reasoning and practice,” Hunter wrote. “Character is similarly situated.”

“It develops in relation to moral convictions defined by specific moral, philosophical, or religious truths. Far from being free-floating abstractions, these traditions of moral reasoning are fixed in social habit and routine within social groups and communities,” he continued. “Grounded in this way, ethical ideals carry moral authority. Thus, it is the concrete circumstances situating moral understanding that finally animate character and make it resilient.”

Some religious schools have strong moral convictions, but weak rituals or fragmented communities. The Faith Family program provides a compelling example of a social habit that forms convictions and character by repeated practice—in both older and younger students.

The National Mentoring Resource Center offers insight on peer mentoring for educators interested in building the same kind of formative culture in play at OLV.

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.

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.

Coach invites mentors to model, not talk

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Education consultant Darryl Williams is taking a different approach to coaching his daughter’s 5th-grade basketball team, and it’s working wonders to focus the girls in on the game.

The idea is simple.

Williams and other coaches invited girls from the varsity high school basketball team to come to practice, but it wasn’t for the typical role model pep talk or coaching pointers.

According to Teach Like a Champion:

No, Darryl skipped the things mentors usually get asked to do and asked the varsity girls instead to practice with his girls—to participate in the drills alongside the younger girls but to practice like they would in a varsity practice. To model what it meant to them to practice.

Williams explained that the experience instantly changed the perspective of the girls on his young and inexperienced team, which included many who had never previously played.

“You should have seen their faces when they understood that for varsity girls, the layup line is full-speed,” Williams said.

The coach said that giving his players an opportunity to experience how serious athletes approach the game opened their eyes in ways a talk about teamwork or hustle couldn’t do.

“They never had to say a word, those girls, but the learning was deep. Seeing the level of focus and concentration from the older girls was a revelation to the younger girls: How ready they were when an activity started. How locked-in mentally. How they listened and used feedback . . . These things were suddenly clear,” Teach Like a Champion reports.

“Darryl says it was an epiphany for his girls. All of a sudden they understood in a day-to-day sense what it meant to be a serious athlete. Nobody had to explain anything.”

Education researchers have studied how age segregation in schools can undermine the development of responsibility.

Murray Milner, scholar at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia, wrote in Freaks, Geeks, and Cool Kids that “A system of increasing privileges and responsibilities linked to the year in school can increase the sense of community and reduce competition.”

Williams’ approach of letting local high school girls model how serious athletes put their full effort into practice undoubtedly improved his 5th-grade team both on and off the field.

A growing movement of coaches at the Positive Coaching Alliance are working with professional athletes to help locals create “Better Athletes, Better People” through a variety of resources, from workshops, to online courses, to certifications.

“The Positive Coach uses the power of positive reinforcement to pursue winning and the more important goals of teaching life lessons through sports,” according to the group’s website.

©2017 Advanced Studies in Culture

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