From the Archives: Students and Teachers in the Facebook Age

I've mentioned before that since I started this blog, I have been keeping an archive of articles and blog posts that I think might someday give me an idea for a post of my own. Generally I do this by emailing myself the links and archiving them in gmail under the label "blog ideas." My goal for these couple of weeks before faculty meetings was to work my way through some of those archived articles. I clicked on the "blog ideas" label this morning, and gmail brought up 120+ emails, so I guess I've got my work cut out for me.

Down near the bottom of the list was this Washington Post article about young teachers getting into trouble because their Facebook profiles contained information, language, or images that their schools (I think rightly so) found inappropriate for people working with children and teenagers. The article got a lot of attention in the edublogs when it came out, and most of the discussion centered around trying to define appropriate internet behavior in the Facebook/MySpace age.

The article strikes a chord for me now as I am gearing up for my job at a new school later this month. The school describes itself as "unconventional" in a number of ways, one of the most obvious being the basic relationship between teachers and students. Students call all their teachers by first names, and this is symbolic of a general atmosphere in which the students see their teachers more as friends in a cooperative activity than as authority figures. At this point in my career, this will probably be as big an adjustment as it was at 21 to walk into my first classroom, where students were expected to stand every time I entered the room, and become Mr. K------ for the first time.

Based on the day and a half that I have spent on campus at the school so far, this more informal relationship between teachers and students seems to work well for this particular school and for the environment that they have created there. I'm not sure it is something that would generalize to all school environments. For me, the main challenge is going to be rethinking and redefining my own relationship with the students, and finding that line where friendship ends, and authority begins. Fortunately, my Facebook profile doesn't say anything about me sleeping with a hooker, so I'm a step ahead of some people already.

What do you think the ideal relationship between teachers and students is?

Summer Camp: Challenges

In this series of summer camp related posts, I keep coming back to the day camp back in Massachusetts where I have been a camper, counselor and administrator. Many of my ideas about what an ideal school would be like, especially in terms of building community and character, come from my experiences there. One of the big pieces of that community building experience was what we called challenges.

Anyone who has done a leadership training course or any sort of Project Adventure program will be familiar with the idea of challenges. Basically, a group is assigned a cooperative task with a set of proscribed rules to make the task more difficult. Completing the task generally requires that the group work very well together and that every member of the group be involved in getting to the finish. One of the classic examples is a challenge we called 'The Peanut Butter Pit.' The task is to get the entire group from a start point to an end point across a boiling pit of sticky peanut butter/corrosive acid/radioactive sludge. Between the start line and the end line, the campers are not allowed to touch the ground. All they have to help them across are a series of evenly spaced cinder blocks in the middle of the pit, and two or three narrow but sturdy boards. The goal is to challenge both their cooperative and problem solving skills.

Generally, we did about three challenges over the course of a four week session, each one a little longer than the one before. The last and longest was generally supposed to take about one full day of camp, although there are legends about epic challenges that took three or four days to complete. Each challenge also came with a back story, usually involving counselors in costume breaking into circle time to enlist the campers help preventing some imminent threat to the camp, the world or the universe.

At the end of the challenge (and often in the middle of more difficult ones) counselors would lead group discussions about how things had gone, what worked and didn't work, and what they could take away from the experience and apply to other areas of life. They were given a chance to give a 'hats off' to members of the group who had been especially helpful, and were guided to the idea that a successful group effort requires both leaders and followers. Finally, the all gave each other a ceremonial pat on the back to congratulate themselves on a job well done.

As a counselor and a teacher, I took a number of lessons away from working with kids on these challenges:

1) Frustration is an important part of the learning process. Personal growth comes from overcoming challenges, even artificial ones. Students need to learn how to handle themselves when things don't come easily. If they can learn that lesson in the relatively safe environment of school, it will serve them well throughout their lives.

2) We learn lessons best when we explicitly talk about them. Somewhere in the teaching process, we need to have a conversation with the students about why they are doing the things they are doing, and what it is we hope they get out of it. The more we give them a chance to talk about the goals, and assess their own progress towards them, the better off they will be.

3) Sometimes students should just be left to figure stuff out for themselves. One of the key pieces to being a counselor in the challenges was to create a safe environment and then to leave them alone to figure out the solution. They need the confidence-building experience of being the ones to solve the problem on their own.

I'm not suggesting in all this that classroom time be taken away from academic pursuits and replaced with team building activities, but I do think that some of the structure of these challenges could be carried over into the classroom. Give the students a difficult task that stretches their abilities, allow them the chance to work through it on their own, even when it is frustrating, and then come back at the end and debrief. In this way, they not only learn the material, but they learn how to work and think independently.

What do you do to really challenge your students?

Summer Camp: Making the Rules

Many of the things that make my former summer camp so unique have been a part of the camp essentially from its beginning. The two things I have talked about so far, appreciations and comfort and caring, are both aspects of the camp that I remember vividly from my days as a camper. One significant aspect of the camp that arrived between my time as a camper and my return as a counselor many years later was the camp constitution.

Schools and other programs for kids have a wide variety of approaches to setting the rules and getting kids to follow them, and no one way is perfect or appropriate for every situation, but I really like the way we went about creating the constitution. It was a multi-day process, and limited time spent on other activities during that time, but I think the rewards more than justified the time spent.

The first step was to get the kids thinking about the idea of community in general, and their place in various communities in particular. Each camper was given a badge, a circular piece of paper divided into three wedges, with space for their name in the middle. They were asked to think of three communities they were a part of. The counselors coached them through some possibilities: their school, their family, their sports teams, etc.. Then they were asked to think of a positive attribute that they brought to each of those communities, maybe something they did to be helpful at home or to be friendly at school. Once they had thought of their three attributes, they drew a picture in each section of the circle. Once completed, this badge represented them as a member of the new camp community that was re-created each summer.

Step two was to start coming up with the rules. They did this in small groups, so there was an opportunity to discuss and refine their ideas. One of the keys was that each rule needed to be phrased as a positive action. They had to say, "Respect other people's belongings," instead of, "Don't steal," or something similar.

Once the various groups had their suggested rules, the whole camp would come together to decide what should be included in the final draft. The rules were read out, and the campers were asked to raise any objections. The counselors leading the discussion were careful to steer the conversation toward objections to the ideas, not the wording. The idea was to build general consensus. At the end, everyone would make some symbolic sign of agreement (usually a hand motion with some silly sound effect) chosen by the kids. The final step was to put all the agreed upon rules onto a giant sheet of paper, and to attach the kid's badges to the paper as symbols of their role in the camp community.

Those of you who have been following along with these camp related posts will begin to see what I meant about certain cult-like, or at least ritualistic, aspects of the camp. But, having seen it in action, I have to say that this approach to creating the camp constitution was an incredibly powerful tool. When there was an problem with one of the kids, it was very effective to be able to remind him about the constitution discussion and why it was that the camp had chosen to include certain rules. It was like putting a judo move on a kid who was all prepared to get yelled at, and suddenly found himself explaining to you why what he did was wrong.

As with many of the things I talk about in this blog, I'm not a big believer in the idea that there is one and only one way to do things. When something seems to work, I look for the essential element that is making it work, and think about how that piece could be adapted to many different situations. In this case, I think the essential element comes from giving the kids a chance to help make the rules, and in doing so really think about their purpose. If the rules are something they have agreed to, and even helped create, they are much more likely to see the point in following them. It becomes not just about staying out of trouble, but about behaving as a responsible member of a community.

What effective ways of creating/enforcing the rules have you come across?

Summer Camp: Appreciations

Last week I mentioned that a lot of my inspiration for this blog comes from my time as a camper and counselor at a summer camp back home in Massachusetts. I described the somewhat cult-like devotion that the camp has from many of the campers and staff who have spent time there. This devotion is cultivated in the many community building activities built into the structure of the camp. The one I wanted to talk about today is appreciations.

The camp runs two four week sessions over the course of the summer. At the end of each session are a variety of activities designed to bring closure to the session, including an open house for parents to come and see what their children have been working on all summer, and a sleepover where the kids get to go for a night swim and stay up late watching movies. In addition, over the course of the last week, the kids do appreciations.

During the morning and afternoon circle times, the kids go to sit one by one in a chair that has been magically transformed into the Appreciation Chair. While there, they call on volunteers from the group to appreciate them, which is to say something positive about them. The kids are coached to make their appreciations meaningful. "I appreciate you because you're nice," is a bad appreciation, while, "I appreciate you because on the first day of camp, when I didn't know anyone, you came up and asked if I wanted to join your game," is a good appreciation. This is a situation where having older, experienced campers mixed in with the younger ones helps to set the tone, and to give good examples of how it's all supposed to work.

Again, as with many of the community building aspects of the camp, it can appear a little cheesy, but as an established routine, it is incredibly powerful. It is very unusual in life for someone of any age to be openly and publicly complimented by their peers. We don't often hear about the positive ways we have affected other people. Appreciations give kids a chance to see themselves in a whole new, and entirely positive, light.

One of the pieces we have to coach the kids through, is to recognize that being complimented is an inherently uncomfortable activity. We aren't used to it, and we often don't know how to respond. The kids are reminded to say thank you after each appreciation as a sign that they have heard and accepted the compliment.

The exact format of these appreciations might not work in every environment, but the idea is a powerful one that can and should be adapted to many situations. Kids spend a lot of time telling each other how they are different (read worse) than everyone else. Wouldn't it be nice if they had a regular opportunity to tell each other the ways in which they are great?

Summer Camp: Comfort and Caring

By a quick count, I think I have either attended or worked at six or seven different summer camps over the course of my life. Of all of them, one in particular has played a central role in my development as a person, as a teacher, and as a thinker about education. I first attended the camp (as always, I will avoid accurate names) in the summer between fourth and fifth grades. From that summer on, I and/or one of my siblings was a camper, counselor, or administrator there continuously until last summer, when for the first time in our adult lives, neither my sister nor I were working there, overall a streak of 22 years.

Among other significant life events that occurred at this camp, I met my wife while we were both working there in the summer of 2000, eight years ago this weekend. Since my wife's younger sister has been on staff at the camp for the past two summers, I count the family streak as still active at 24 years and counting.

While this family devotion is extreme, it is not actually exceptional. Many other people and families have similar stories and streaks, a fact that gives the camp a certain cult-like aura that many newcomers find off-putting at first. My wife often tells the story of her first day of staff orientation, at the end of which she went home wondering what the hell she had gotten herself into.

There are many aspects of the camp that lead to this bizarre devotion, and over the course of the summer I will spend some time on many of them, because I think if schools could cultivate similar feelings of attachment in their students, the job of education would be much easier. The most important of them, though, is that, more than any other environment for children that I have ever been a part of, this camp gives children a safe place to be their true selves. I have spoken with many young staff and campers who spend all year being miserable at school, feeling trapped in a place that doesn't understand them, waiting for summer to come so they can go out and find themselves again.

Again, there are many pieces in place to create this welcoming environment, but the first of them happens almost the moment that the campers arrive each day. Every morning, camp starts in a circle. The circle is a camp motif that is reinforced in many ways over the course of a day and the summer. Each circle is a mixed aged group, from fourth through eighth grades, plus counselors of a variety of ages and life stages.

Circle time begins with Comfort and Caring, a time for those who want to to share whatever is on their mind that morning. Usually it is light-hearted--stories of baseball games played, or new Pokemon cards acquired--but sometimes there is more vital information shared--a beloved pet passed away, a best friend gone to overnight camp for the summer. In addition to giving everyone the chance to share, and to feel like the events of their lives are important to other people, it is also a chance for the kids to get off their chests whatever thing has been occupying them. Once relieved of that burden, they are more ready to focus on the tasks of the day.

It can be a little hokey, and the oldest kids often roll their eyes at the prospect, but how much happier and more productive would we adults be if our days began with the chance to share with our colleagues the things that were exciting or depressing us that day, to ask for a little leeway when we missed our morning coffee, or to feel like our accomplishments were celebrated by the people with whom we spend our days. A little bit of hokey is not such a bad thing.

What English Class Should Teach Students About Character

One of my responsibilities during my last couple years working in New Jersey was as one of the teacher representatives to the school's Judiciary Board. The Judiciary Board consisted of three teachers and three students (the student body president and two specifically elected representatives, one junior and one senior). When a major school rule was broken, it was our responsibility to determine as best as possible the facts of the case, and to recommend consequences to the Head of School and the principals. We saw a little bit of everything you might imagine that teenagers do, from the unending accumulation of minor offenses to bigger things like theft and drinking. More than anything else, though, we saw cases of cheating and plagiarism.

I had a conversation recently with my current colleagues here in northern Virginia. I am the only native born American in the Language Department, and we were discussing what they saw as the peculiarly American obsession with plagiarism. In the schools where they grew up, plagiarism was, if not outright encouraged, certainly openly permitted. It was the students' job to go out and find information from people who knew better than they did, and regurgitate that information. The extent to which you rephrased or processed that information was really beside the point, as far as they were concerned.

My background is pretty much the opposite. Where I went to school for 7th-12th grades, academic dishonesty (plagiarism, cheating, lying to a teacher) was grounds for immediate expulsion, a more severe policy than the two strikes given for drug or alcohol offenses. That environment certainly shaped my sense of the severity of plagiarism, and made it difficult for me to sit on the Judiciary Board as student after student came through for the same dumb things and walked away with a minor slap on the wrist. I felt at the time that if we made it more clear to the students that academic dishonesty was impermissible, and that the penalties were severe, the less it would happen.

Whether or not a one strike policy would have been the solution to the problem, the issue itself is one that schools have to deal with more and more, and need to find appropriate solutions for. The Internet gives students access to an increasing number of ways to avoid doing their own work, as well as teachers more and more resources for catching them. At schools like McLean High School, right here in my own backyard, the resulting conflict is starting to boil over.

It is not just about the increased resources available on the Internet. The Information Age is changing the role of information itself, and we should be discussing with our students just what that means for the morals and ethics of using information. On the one hand you have sites like Wikipedia, where information is open, fluid, and without owners. In many other areas, though, information is an increasingly valuable commodity, and we need to think about it as we would think about anything else with financial worth. This is going to be a difficult situation for students to navigate, since the opportunities to break the rules are growing, even as the rules become more and more important.

In that context, teaching students to do their own work, and to give credit where it is due to the work of others, is a hugely important part of education. I include it here as I am working through my ideas about English class because it comes up so often as students resort to CliffsNotes and SparkNotes to do their reading for them, and downloaded essays to save them hours of writing. Severe and immediate consequences for breaking the rules may not be the best solution in all schools or for all students, although I certainly got the message from my school, but it needs to be an explicit part of the curriculum, so that when students go out into the world they are prepared for the moral questions that lie ahead of them.

How serious an infraction do you think plagiarism is, and what would you do to discourage it?

It's the Caring Stupid

My friend Stacy is a former colleague of mine from my days in New Jersey. She teaches history and American government, and is one of the best teachers I have ever worked with. She does everything a great teacher should do: inspires and challenges her students; makes them really think about what she's teaching; earns their respect; and gets them to actually learn the material and the skills in her curriculum. Stacy writes a blog at sassafrasmama.blogspot.com where she talks about her life as a teacher, a single mom, and all around great person. I really wish more of my friends did this. Reading her blog has been a great way to feel like I'm more involved in her everyday life, even though I rarely get to see her these days.

Stacy's post from yesterday made me think a bit about my whole approach to my build-a-school project. So far I have been oriented towards the curricular goals of a school: what the school should be teaching. Stacy reminds me that it's much more import how we are teaching. That's the part that really makes a difference in students' lives.

Parent Conferences: A Success Story

Friday was parent conferences here at school. For most teachers, there is always some anxiety when it comes time to meet the parents. Parent meetings are evaluation time, not just for the kids, but for the teachers and parents, too. This is when we all find out how well we've been doing our jobs, and there is always that chance that the evaluation is not going to go well for someone. When the meeting goes badly, it can go very badly, and I think many teachers go into the day with their defenses up against that possibility. All of us have our war stories of one sort or another. In private schools, where the parents often see themselves as the paying customers, the pressure is particularly high to prove that you are delivering the quality product the parents are expecting.

On this occasion, conferences went pretty well for me. My current position is as a long-term substitute for a teacher who had to leave unexpectedly back in November. By the time I started here at the end of January, I was the third Spanish teacher of the year for my students, with who knows how many short-term substitutes in the meantime. Most of the parents I met with on Friday were just happy that there had been a consistent warm body in the class for the last few months.

One of my meetings was with the mother of one of my fifth graders, Bill. Bill is struggling in my class, which always increases the chances that the conversation will be uncomfortable, but in this case it was very productive. I mentioned my concerns, not only for his performance this year, but also going into the more challenging middle school curriculum that starts here in sixth grade. We talked about things we could all be doing to improve things now, and things he might do over the summer to prepare for sixth grade. We finished the meeting with a basic plan to move forward.

My first class today was with the fifth grade. Bill was like a completely different kid this morning. He raised his hand to answer questions, instead of sitting like a lump in his chair, and generally gave the correct answers. He seemed happy, confident, and prepared for class, the first time all year I would have described him as any of those things. He'd also had his hair cut. Maybe it was all just the haircut.

Now I know that it was just one class, and that it's a long road still to June, and an even longer one to get through sixth grade Spanish and beyond; but something positive clearly took place from Friday to today, and whatever it was started with a ten minute conversation with Bill's mom.

So, here's my thought for the day. It takes a team to educate a child, and parents are probably, or at least hopefully, the most important member of that team. The better the communication between school and parents, and the greater the parents' involvement in their children's education, the stronger that education is going to be. As we build our school, we are going to need formal structures to get parents involved in, and knowledgeable about, their children's education. Sometimes they will be able to help their kids in ways we just can't.

What do you do, or would you do, to get parents involved in your school community?