Student Engagement & Rigor, Relevance, and Relationships

The following are some key questions focused on how to assess Student Engagement as it relates to the Rigor-Relevance-Relationships framework.

RIGOR

1. Are different types of students motivated and encouraged to become engaged throughout the school? How?
• differently-abled students
• disengaged students
• low-income students
• different student sub-cultures
• students from minority populations
2. Is there an active recruitment program?
3. Are current student leaders encouraged to nurture their successors?
4. Are the students given training in leadership skills and/or procedural matters?
5. Is Student Engagement visible in activities, programs, services and policy-making throughout the school? How or why not?
6. Are mentors assigned to coach Student Engagement?
7. What resources does the school provide to support Student Engagement?
• travel budgets
• telephone/fax/e-mail budget or access
• budget to conduct consultations
8. Are students actively encouraged to speak at meetings?
9. Are there active measures within the school to promote a positive image of students among adults? What are those measures?
10. Are student issues addressed from a positive, present, and powerful perspective?
11. What steps are taken to prepare for turnover among the students and adults who are involved in promoting Student Engagement?
12. Describe the ways in which the process was made more flexible to accommodate Student Engagement.
13. Describe the ways in which the time lines/deadlines were adjusted to allow time for Student Engagement.
14. Describe the ways in which the current process of Student Engagement was built upon existing Student Voice activities.
15. Is there an elected/appointed official responsible for encouraging Student Engagement?
16. Is/are the staff assigned to ensure that Student Engagement is meaningful?
17. Are adults asked to volunteer to mentor individual students in the process of fostering Student Engagement?
18. Are students asked to volunteer to mentor individual adults in the process of fostering Student Engagement?
19. Are there any parallel goals or can the mission of your school be assisted by Student Engagement? Describe the connections, if possible.

RELEVANCE

1. What steps are taken to make the issues in your program relevant to students?
2. How are the student participants recognized?
3. What competencies are being explicitly developed among the Student and Adult Partners?
4. What steps/actions are taken to ensure the process is fun?
5. What opportunities are provided for student to form friendships beyond Student Engagement activities?
6. What procedures are used for students to check-in and to be accounted for? (security and safety issues)?

RELATIONSHIPS

1. How do students involved in fostering Student Engagement consult other students? How often? On what?
2. How do they seek guidance from adults? How often?
3. Does Student Engagement have…
• clearly stated goals?
• a plan of action?
• time limits /deadlines?
4. Are students expected to make representations on behalf of the whole group, even though they might not entirely agree?
5. How are students ensuring that their health/family/schoolwork/friends/do not suffer because they are involved?
6. Are students selected to be heard, and how does that happen?
7. Do, or how does, the student partner report to other students?

Find more resources on student engagement at www.SoundOut.org

Acceptable Bullying

Bullying has many roots that educators are quick to call out: The home environment, parental role models, peer influence, mass media, and poor school funding all get their fair share. However, there is a more direct root that teachers and principals can start fixing right now, no excuses: School acceptance.

From their first moments walking through the doorways of school buildings across the nation, students are taught that they must conform to that school's norms in order to survive. That means their clothing, their speech, their behavior, and their attitude must fit within the "acceptable" ranges. A variety of mechanisms allow adults to determine and enforce those ranges, including the curriculum (and hidden curriculum), classroom management methods, building-wide behavior management (including punishment and rewards), and the school climate in general. Students reinforce these ranges of acceptability among themselves according to their investment in them. This generally focuses on peer network formation, or cliques. Cliques reinforce each key determinate of school acceptability. While they tend to grow and thrive threw middle and high school, research and parental anecdotes shows that cliques are established in elementary school and earlier. 

I have seen an increase in the amount of enforcement by students over the last decade I have worked in schools. One of the ways this enforcement has always reared its head is as acceptable bullying, which is made okay by adults. Bullying dates from the roots of schools, and earlier (and still) in the public places young people interact, such as neighborhoods and malls. Bullying is a deft way to deal out punishment for unacceptability by boys who don't behave in a way that is perceived as "masculine" enough; and a stealth way for girls to reinforce acceptable behaviors for their peers, as well. It's also used to shore up attitudes about social standing, cultural backgrounds, religious belief, educational levels, and many other factors.

I think that any advocate genuinely concerned with student voice will naturally gravitate to bullying as an issue in schools because bullying is among the easiest ways adults manipulate students every single day. We do this through every way I listed above. The question for me becomes how to teach young people about their voices in ways that allow them to authentically experience the impacts of bullying without perpetuating them problem. How can we increase empathy through meaningful student involvement? 

Rules of Student Engagement

In a growing number of schools across the nation, educators are striving for more than better test scores. Instead they are betting on student engagement, the idyllic notion of investment, engagement, and ownership in learning. The following are lessons I have learned over the last five years as I have worked with more than 50 schools across the US and Canada in their quests to engage students.

Rule #1: Every school should engage every student in every classroom. Learning ability, grade level, interest tracking… none of these should be seen or addressed as barriers to student engagement. Instead, these are point to build upon and learn from. Student engagement is an active, intentional process whereupon young people become purposefully compelled as learners.

Rule #2: Student engagement does not end at the schoolhouse door. Students must be active within their families and throughout their communities. This goes far beyond classroom assignments and community service. Providing learners with active student voice in democratic governance, powerful opportunities for cultural expression, and meaningful experiences of freedom of speech throughout their community can open the doors for students. Authentic student engagement can also occur at home, in play, through positive relationships with adults, and throughout our communities.

Rule #3: Every adult in every student’s life should feel responsible for engaging that student in learning. Only through the constant encouragement and focus of parents, teachers, youth workers, principals, religious leaders, counselors, and other supportive adults will students feel there is a real investment in their education that extends beyond their own interests. Every student should feel that educational success is their responsibility; likewise, every adult should feel that student engagement is theirs.

Rule #4: Give a student a lesson and they’ll think for an hour; teach them how to learn and they will learn a lifetime. Learning to learn is a task that many educators aspire to impart without every being explicit in their intentions. Every student must have a constructivist understanding of the nature of learning, the purpose of schooling, the course of the education system, and the arch of lifelong learning. From kindergarten through graduation educators have more than the opportunity to teach students about learning; they have an obligation.

Rule #5: Engaging students is a living, breathing goal that must continuously evolve. Will Rogers once said, “Even if you’re on the right track you’ll get run over if you don’t move.” We live in a world of transition and change; students change with the times, and often with the days. Do the same old thing and we’ll get the same old outcomes we’ve always had. As technology constantly changes, so do our students, as many educators have told me that students have changed more in the last 5 years than schools have in the last 25. This makes opportunities for real learning through meaningful student involvement.

Learn more about what SoundOut can do for your school by visiting www.SoundOut.org or calling 360-489-9680.

See Young People

The epidemic focused on denying young people's role in modern society continues. In the last week I have seen two articles that attack the very existence of youth today, albeit from two different angles. A major problem with these two specific articles is that they come from within the so-called "youth movement."

Nancy Lublin, the CEO of NYC-based Do Something, moonlights as a regular columnist for the progressive business magazine Fast Company. I meant Lublin once in the early 2000s at an America's Promise event, and have read Fast Company for a decade. I wish neither of them ill.  For almost two years now, Lubkin's articles in the magazine have rubbed me wrong. They're either smuggly self-aggrandizing diatribes, not unlike my blogs, or they're plainly generational boosterism that romanticizes the abilities of younger people. Last month's article falls squarely into the ranks of the latter, and that's why it makes this entry, aptly demanding that we, "See Young People." In it Lublin goes about promoting Millennials as the be-all-end-all of social change, young people who, devoid of guidance or anchoring from previous generations, have risen to the tops of their communities to change the world, all on their own. Devoid of obligation to or acknowledgment of the giants who have walked before them, apparently Lublin believes that young people today are the whipping boys of all generations. That's just a gross over-romanticization, and plays right into a sense of generational inferiority and inability that is not limited to any one generation. (Don't get me wrong: Lublin's organizational strategy relies on discriminating against youth, thinking she knows everything about youth today, and I get that. I disagree with her wholeheartedly.) Every generation is subjected to the scrutiny and judgment of previous turns, and in this way, this generation is no worse than others before it...

...which apparently flies in the face of the next article up for scrutiny. Global Youth Action Network, long run by people who I respect, is apparently siding with the generally age-discriminatory New York Times. In August The Times took it upon themselves to typecast all 20-somethings today with the type of news that makes Lublin's analysis seem fitting and necessary. In one broad stroke, they validated every frustrated baby boomer by broadcasting their facetious answers to the questions, "What Is It About 20-Somethings? Why are so many people in their 20s taking so long to grow up?" Apparently, since people are taking longer today to do five "milestones" carved out by sociologists as essential to achieving adulthood, (completing school, leaving home, becoming financially independent, marrying and having a child), our society may be going to a bad, bad place where it's never gone before. (The best, best essay I've ever read about this is by Jeff Chang.)

What Lublin and The Times get wrong is their generational typecasting: simply because somebody fits into an age group doesn't mean that they're going to think or act in a prescribe-able, predictable way. Lublin is guilty of this because of her well-intended, but over-hyping, of young people today; The Times is just wrong. The author of this piece is apparently ignorant of young people for whom this mold just doesn't fit.

All this brings to mind a quote by French revolutionary author Frantz Fanon, who once wrote that, “He who is reluctant to recognize me opposes me.” Ironically, I think the boosters and the detractors are in the same boat, in that they both refuse to recognize young people for who they really are: diverse, broad, and uncharactizable. For all intents and purposes, let's quit typecasting children, youth, and young adults today- they are simply too different for any generalization to stick across their entire age range. Watch this excellent video with Sir Ken Robinson for more information. And then let's get to the work of personalization: if you want to slam young people, be specific! Target those middle class white suburban youth who you grew up with! Aim at those low-income Hispanic and Latino youth who you fear! Pull for the upper class, well-meaning white girls who you've always envied.

Whatever you do, however you do it, please, please, please: SEE Young People.

DMV Crash Crisis Reaches Fever Pitch!

For years I've been reading media analyses of youth issues by renowned scholars and academics like Henry Giroux and Mike Males. A post on Facebook by a friend of mine inspires my first chance to share an observation of my own called, "DMV Crash Crisis Reaches Fever Pitch!"

For years the public has been bombarded by stories of scary young drivers by newspapers, t.v. reporters, and recently, car insurance providers. Today's story comes courtesy of WPXI in Pennsylvania. Rather than simply reporting on a driver who crashed through the local DMV office after their test, the article's title focused on the age of the offender: "Bridgeville DMV Closed After Teen Crashes Through Building." This gross sensationalism highlights that the driver was a teenager, rather than being frustrated, intimidated, or forgetful.

Readers of this article are implicitly encouraged to assume this is a teen-specific issue. But a quick google search shows that crisis doesn't just affect youth! Instead, it's torturing all age groups across the country:

• "Man Crashes Into DMV After Passing Driver's Test"
• "Driving Test Taker Crashes into DMV Building"
• "Woman Crashes Into DMV, Flunks Road Test"
• "Oops! 88-Year-Old Crashes Into DMV During Driving Test!  Read More: Oops! 88-Year-Old Crashes Into DMV During Driving Test!"

More importantly than it being an age-specific issue, I think the headlines should focus on the phenomenon and frequency of drivers crashing into DMVs before, during, and after their tests. What's up with that? Maybe an in-depth analysis by a serious news agency or an expose on the pressures of driver's tests is due; perhaps a bold legislator in some hyper-vigilant state will propose a bill to ban driver's testing at DMV offices. Who knows how far this can go? But please, please, let's stop with the media-fueled paranoia focused on youth for any reason, including driving...

When Youth Voice Sucks.

A friend recently asked me whether a graffiti spree by a group of youth in a Midwestern city constituted youth voice. Following is my response:

I believe every expression young people share is youth voice, whether or not we agree with it. The challenge becomes whether or not adults are capable and/or desiring of listening to it. I teach adults that there are two types of youth voice: convenient and inconvenient. Convenient youth voice does what we want, when we want, where we want it to. Inconvenient youth voice are expressions of youth voice that do not fit the mold of adult expectation. 

Hidden within the story of this youth graffiti crew are genuine expressions of humanity. The question shouldn't be how should we punish these kids; rather, it should be how can we refocus them. The difference between adults and young people, in this respect, is that we know young people have the developmental capacity to realign their behavior to socially acceptable outcomes. More importantly, they have the capacity to evolve their own expectations, abilities, knowledge and passions towards the good of society.

The question I would pose is whether the adults who are in these young peoples' lives are being held accountable for the present and future of these youth- and not just their parents, either. Are their teachers committed and actively working towards their engagement as lifelong learners? Are the youth workers in their lives promoting civic engagement and active membership in the larger society around them? Does their minister deliberately reach out to help them make meaning of their worlds on their terms, rather than forcing them to come to God in an adult-prescribed manner? All young people, rich and poor, black, brown and white, deserve completely engaged, connected, and meaningful relationships with adults throughout their lives.

Anything less than all this is doing these particular youth a disservice, to say nothing of the communities they belong to and the society where they live. We have to be bigger than that, right?