By Judith Nuss, CASEL Consultant, Collaborating Districts Initiative in Cleveland Metropolitan School District and Austin Independent School District
I have participated in the National School Climate (NSCC) Summer Institute several times. Each time I come away rejuvenated, educated, and inspired with enhanced skills and knowledge to activate positive change in our schools for teachers, students and parents. Probably my most memorable institute experience was my first one in the summer of 2006. At the time, I had just completed my rookie year as Director of Social and Emotional Learning in a distressed urban public school district in a state capital city. I went to the Summer Institute as a true and eager learner – wanting to know all the research and the best practices for promoting social and emotional learning.
That was the summer I first met Dr. Jonathan Cohen, a most personable professor and researcher - down to earth, advanced in social and emotional competence, and always with an appreciative voice that could sooth a raging bull. To date, Jon remains a valued mentor and colleague. I always value effective leadership.
I also first met Mary Utne O’Brien, then Executive Director of CASEL (Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning.) After being mesmerized by Mary’s keynote message, I participated in a small break-out session she facilitated. In addition to meeting the learning needs of this session’s group, Mary warmly counseled me, responded enthusiastically and knowledgably to my questions, and greatly inspired me to strenuously climb the uphill challenge I was leading in my district – that of promoting district-wide and explicit social and emotional learning for all K-12 students.
I remember asking myself about this field of social and emotional education. Why does this field of study and practice have such caring, thoughtful, smart, and humanistic people? What is it about this work that allows its leaders to stay so true to their selves – always modeling and promoting calm, intelligent, change agency leadership with a vision of well-being for all?
At this same NSCC Summer Institute, I was also introduced to Facing History and Ourselves, a civic education non-profit that cultivates democratic educational practices while fighting prejudice, racism, and violence. Their representatives informed us with photos, audio, video, media and firsthand accounts of the genocide in Darfur. Talk about raising awareness! My personal mission was immediately expanded!
Less than a year later I had collaborated with others to garner federal character education resources to implement Facing History learning modules in our district’s middle schools. Teachers, students, staff, parents, and community members in the district became uniquely engaged in authentic, rigorous learning around historical case studies of the Civil Rights era and the Holocaust. Many who were involved in this learning continue to “be the change” in their individual lives and networks.
For me, the NSCC Summer Institute has been a refuge of sorts. My husband and I love New York City. His birthday falls on July 11 so he is always pleased to accompany me to NYC to celebrate his birthday while I attend the Institute. He walks the city during the day, watching the people, enjoying the restaurants, and at night, we enjoy at least one Broadway show and have some spectacular dinners.
I learn during the day and I love it! I enjoy watching the teams of people who attend the Institute. I see them grow in relationship and watch them learn together over a few days. As a career educator, it has always been joyful to observe children and youth learn, but I have to say, there is a whole different level of reward to observing adults learn and change in their thinking, assumptions, and skills. I notice “a-ha” moments, ideas generating, understanding growing, and plans being made for the new school year. I see hope in the very people who can lead and make overdue change in our schools. Often, these are the same people who first arrived at the Summer Institute worn out from another challenging school year. By the end of Summer Institute, we are all invigorated with thoughtful plans for positive action and enriched by shared relationship of learning, understanding, and focus!
By Shawn Healy, Civic Learning & Engagement Scholar, Robert R. McCormick Foundation
A positive school climate is essential to a school living its civic mission. I’m admittedly a novice when it comes to school climate, but when I arrived in New York last July to attend the National School Climate Institute’s 2012 Summer Institute, I knew this much, and believed it deeply in my heart.
My expertise lies in civic education and engagement. I taught high school social studies for six years, am a PhD candidate in the field of political socialization, and chair the Illinois Civic Mission Coalition, which advocates for school-based civic learning opportunities across the formal curriculum, in extracurricular activities, and through day-to-day school governance.
My combined experiences in the classroom, as an academic, and as an advocate, taught me that a challenging curriculum incorporating proven civic learning practices is alone insufficient in preparing young people for their roles in our representative democracy. Principals must be a driving force for a school’s civic mission, with specific attention to staff development, from hiring to evaluation to professional development. Schools must also build reciprocal relationships with the surrounding community, where both are resources for one another.
A positive school climate is the glue that holds this all together. I developed a new and ongoing appreciation for this bonding agent during my experiences at the 2012 Summer Institute.
Simply stated, a school’s climate either reinforces or undermines democratic lessons that occur in its classrooms. Schools with positive climates practice democracy through constant attention to relationships among and between administrators, faculty and staff, students, parents, and other community stakeholders. They support civic norms and values through policy and practice, and students graduate with a sense of responsibility and efficacy.
I learned there are many entry points to school climate. Attention to school climate is a powerful prescription for bullying prevention, and an important vehicle for elevating youth voice. Some see it as a means of improving student achievement, and others as a way of better including and celebrating the gifts of special needs students. Similarly, issues of equity among all students rise to the fore, with important implications for my own work in the civic learning space.
The Summer Institute experience broadened my understanding of the scope of school climate work, and allowed me to think about how I can integrate it into my own daily dealings. Upon returning to Chicago, we matched a high school in our Democracy Schools Network with the NSCC for a staff training and introduction to school climate measurement tools. It is our hope that this pilot project will set the stage for further work with other schools throughout Illinois.
We’ve also integrated school climate into our revised Illinois Civic Blueprint (publication pending, with the original document accessible here), which offers a scalable approach to school-based civic learning statewide. School climate has even entered the assessment and application tools we use with prospective Democracy Schools to strengthen their civic learning programs.
I’ll be back in Chelsea in July for the 2013 Summer Institute with a team representing the Illinois Civic Mission Coalition I chair, including a regional superintendent of schools, a coordinator of student leadership and service-learning from a large urban school district, and two classroom teachers. Collectively, we hope to expand our working knowledge of school climate reform, network and learn from fellow advocates across the country, and strategize about how we can implement model school climate policies and processes across multiple layers of the educational landscape in Illinois.
Last year’s Summer Institute experience helped me operationalize my deeply held belief that a school’s attention to building and maintaining a positive climate is in service of its civic mission. I’m confident that the 2013 experience will have a similar galvanizing effect for new and repeat attendees alike, and I truly look forward to learning about your own entry point into the growing movement for school climate reform.
Shawn Healy and the McCormick Foundation can be found on Twitter @McCormick_Fdn.
NSCC introduces its first blog in a series of Summer Institute posts highlighting participant and presenter experiences. Stay connected to us weekly for a unique perspective of Summer Institute offerings, teachings, and benefits.
Schools throughout our country have entered a most special time of the academic year. An air of solemnity, severity, stricture, sobriety, and “something of profoundly great import going on” is palpable and permeating. Why is this time different from all other times in the school year? For the vast majority of K-12 public schools throughout the land, we have begun the most important “high holy days of testing”. High stakes testing has begun in earnest and those stakes are much higher than ever before (as is evident from recent noteworthy events). The next few weeks will see well-heeled routines discarded, any sense of new content or learning put on hold, and rigor replace vigor in every facet of the school day.
This week’s deluge of testing, as has been the case for most years since NCLB and Race to the Top made sure that standardized testing occupied a primary spot in school accountability, comes after a lengthy preparation period. Almost a Lenten-like vigil accompanies the weeks (and even months) that lead up to actual tests. And the tradition of “giving up” things certainly occurs as well. Schools sacrifice many different “niceties” to ready themselves for testing. Some of the things that need to be curtailed or denied might be recess, creative expression, “fun”, higher order thinking activities, social emotional growth, service-learning, the arts, civic educational opportunities and a promotion of student voice.
This vigil for the “high holy days of testing” will also include the requisite (and highly ritualized!) preparations. All bulletin boards must be shrouded. All books or classroom resources that might give an unfair advantage must be removed. Any computers or other electronic devices need to be disabled. Every potentially distracting form of stimulation (including children’s displayed artwork) has to be expunged. And we will begin hearing the almost mantric expressions in the days leading up to tests: “Get a good night’s sleep”. “Eat a healthy breakfast”. “Don’t stress”. “You can do it”.
I do not mean to be flippant, overly hyperbolic or disrespectful with the above reflections. However, as a member of The National School Climate Center, the distressing and rapid proliferation of a highly-charged test culture is altogether too real and its deleterious effects altogether too present. After collaborating on school climate improvement methods with school communities since the beginning of an academic year, I have literally been asked NOT to come in to the building for at least a month before testing begins. And substantive, important student led work around promoting Upstander behavior needs to be curtailed or cut out completely so that increased time can be given to test prep The underpinnings of that decision seems to be: “that school climate stuff is nice; but we need to get our grades up, or else!” The fear of heightened accountability seemingly trumps all other school community concerns. And, there’s a strong message we deliver to students that we have set our priorities, not on their social/emotional development, intellectual curiosity, civic engagement or participants as co-learners in their education, but on their ability to “perform” for us.
It seems that in the very polarizing arena of school reform, there are very clearly demarcated “lines in the sand”. Unfortunately, the battle cry (and always with the caveat that it’s “all for the good of the kids”) becomes: “either you are with us or you are against us”. Grossly overemphasized high stakes testing apparently tried to address accountability without looking at anything else. This “one trick pony” made a lot of test prep companies a huge amount of money, demoralized many teachers (by putting their names in national newspapers next to their students’ grades) and, perhaps most unfortunately, limited the voice of students in just how we can best accommodate their learning needs.
It’s not a time to abandon our quest for accountability. Indeed, there are school leaders promoting rational and good accountability methods by emphasizing a more balanced view of what testing is (and is not!). I was fortunate to attend a powerful youth-directed, youth-planned, and youth-led event this past weekend. One of the invited guests who was there to listen and learn as well as to share comments was Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. She has addressed, over and over again, just how detrimental a narrow view of testing can be. So it was so refreshing to hear her (so very early on a beautiful Saturday morning!) make a plea for guaranteeing a “seat at the table” for students in determining just how we can best shape what a quality education needs to be. And she was extremely clear that “attending to the whole child, including socially and emotionally, is REAL accountability”.
How do we ensure that “the way we do school” in the future (hopefully, in the near future!) does not merely use standardized test scores to determine our efforts? How do we start to re-define what true accountability needs to be? And how do we begin the very, very necessary process of deflating the gross importance assigned to “the high holy days of testing”? Let’s begin this week by realizing that standardized test results only help us measure a very, very narrow and limited segment of what goes on in a school. And, let’s remember that we need to integrate crucial social and emotional learning with academic instruction.
In many of my teacher/staff-training workshops, I like to start with a protocol that I describe as “The Twilight Zone Supermarket Experience” (I’m realizing that very quickly I am dating myself with my cultural allusions and soon will have to accept the fact that many in my audience won’t have a clue to what I am referring!). I ask the assembled participant’s to project themselves into the future fifteen to twenty years. They are wheeling a grocery cart through the aisles when they hear their name called out from behind them. An excited former student approaches and says “Wow, you taught me twenty years ago. These are the things I remember about you and your class….”. I then ask them to quickly jot down what they think their legacy is to their students; the things for which they will be remembered. In the many years of guiding this activity, I have never gotten back that open statement with comments such as:.
“Wow, I really remember that you used to teach an amazing test-prep”.
“You were terrific at lining us up in size order and keeping us quiet”.
“You always, always, always had your objectives written on the board.”
“You taught a mean drill to make us remember the Pythagorean Theorem”.
“You always had a way of making sure that the subject matter you taught was way more important than anything that might have been going on in our lives”.
“When kids misbehaved in your class, you never hesitated to let them know who was in charge and quickly enforce the rules with zero-tolerance for excuses”.
The probable reason that I never get back comments like that is because teachers and staff predictably reflect on their former teachers and mentors. And when they do that, they realized they were inspired to enter the teaching profession for a whole lot more noble and lofty reasons than simply a love of subject matter.
Most often, this activity results in imagined comments from former students that include:
“You always had such a passion for us and for our success”.
“You always made sure to celebrate my voice and my opinions”.
“You made me feel special and that I can achieve more than I thought”.
“You were concerned about me as a person and not just me as a student”.
“You listened”
“You cared”
“I knew that you were always dependable”
“You challenged me to stretch myself and be a critical thinker and learner for life”.
“You never let me settle for anything but the best I had to offer”.
After reflecting on comments from teachers during the “The Twilight Zone Supermarket Experience”, we are better prepared to ask ourselves the question: what am I doing in my classroom today that will have the most impact on the students I teach? And just as importantly: what are the routines, protocols, procedures, systems in place that prevent me from being the type of teacher I want to be. Proponents of academic rigor tend to get a bit scared with these reflections. It’s a fear that, upon tending to the social/emotional needs of our students, there won’t be an environment to test, drill, evaluate, assess, and memorize like in the past. And my response to that is always the same…..Alleluia! If I am really concerned with advancing 21st Century skills in students to help create the engaged, concerned, empathic, resilient and civically engaged citizen that I want my students to become, I better leave the systems and dispositions behind that no longer serve to accomplish this.
School climate improvement efforts aren’t and shouldn’t be separate from educational reform efforts. They should feed each other and inform each other. We do not tend to the social/emotional needs of students at the sacrifice of their education. In fact, research has shown time and time again that neglecting SEL has a detrimental effect on grades, graduation rates, disciplinary issues, attendance, and teacher retention.
I’ve had the great fortune this year of collaborating with a small school district in Southwestern Pennsylvania. In the face of tremendous societal issues such as lack of employment, poverty, and a lack of opportunity for higher education, the school community tries heroically to keep front and center the focus on the centrality of youth. It has not always been a smooth course for the district and there have been tremendous obstacles to overcome. However, there is an incredible desire and commitment to improve school climate and not sacrifice this quest by being so beholden to mandates concerning testing and accountability that get in the way. I don’t want to give the impression that the district has plans to “go rogue” or radically transform the way that school is done (though it’s always exciting to see schools and district such as teachers in Seattle, WA take this route!). However, their driving energy comes from a true belief in the primacy of the student. It’s almost as if every staff member and teacher at the school has taken the amazing quote by Deborah Meier (a visionary and totally committed educator who is a model for us all) to heart: “Only secretly rebellious teachers have ever done right by our least advantaged kids.”
Brandon is a Math Teacher at the high school in the Pennsylvania school district that I mentioned. He is a dynamic and driven “coach” for his students and makes sure they know that they are the primary drivers in their learning and he’s there in the role of guide and mentor. He’s no-nonsense when it comes to making sure that students are on task, prepared, motivated, and engaged. And, perhaps most importantly, deep down, he realizes that he actually doesn’t teach Math at all. He teaches “himself” and Math is the vehicle by which he does that. He understands that, prior to imparting any knowledge on course content, he needs to be a model that the students can relate to. And that is probably the first and most important concept that I hope participants in my trainings grasp. I don’t teach subjects. I teach students. And in doing that, I teach “myself”. My character, my care, my concern, my empathy, my ability to see the best in students and guide them to seeing that too…all of those things create a strong environment to learn and to teach. And I might not be aware of that for about 20 years until I am rolling a grocery cart down the aisle of a supermarket and I hear my name called out!
Brandon is not the stereotypical analytical math teacher. He guides a student group (that is primarily student led!) called STAT: Students Taking Action Together. In myriad ways, this group realizes that it is through relationship building that schools create a climate that is worthy of every one of their members. I want to close this blog with a tremendous poem that Brandon wrote to express these ideas about “teaching myself”. Even the title of his poem has three or four different meanings that can give us pause and reflect on what the true ends of education need to be. Many thanks to Brandon for serving as a model of all that is right with school climate improvement!
Education for Me
Education for me isn't just about the ABC's and 123's
It's about the I’m here for you's and you can talk to me's.
It’s the “You can do it” and the “I know you can”
Molding young minds into a great woman or man.
It's a voice of reason and an ear to listen
Or the look on a face when encouragement is given.
It's a quick hello or a have a nice day
Knowing you may be the only one with that to say.
It's knowing you made a child believe they can do it
And the child knowing you will be there to see them through it.
Being there in that moment of frustration
Knowing you taught them the importance of determination.
It's showing a child the value of respect and hard work
A pat on the back or a smile that makes them feel self-worth.
It's entering your class with a smile and a kind word to say
Knowing your students are leaving with one for the rest of the day.
So when I step into my classroom to teach is my goal
But it's also to build up and feed all the starving souls.
When I was in elementary school, I remember enjoying immensely our daily music appreciation class (Imagine that! Even in the 1960’s at the height of the “Space Race”, it was understood that there was an integral place for the arts in education!). In 3rd Grade, our music teacher, Mrs. Courtney, introduced us to the amazing legacy of Negro Spirituals. What a tremendous experience for us to embrace this wonderful musical tradition, apply it to our history studies, get to actively speak about the current events of civil rights happening in our midst, and best of all singing while we learned. Hindsight lets me realize how the seed of blended learning, cooperative learning, infusion approaches to lesson planning, team teaching, backwards design, and curricular cohesiveness all had their roots in the work of these dedicated teachers! So it’s no wonder how clearly I remember our Science teacher showing up at Ms. Courtney’s music class the day she was prepared to teach us how to sing “Dem Dry Bones”. What great fun we had learning that “the foot bone’s connected to the heel bone. The heel bone’s connected to the ankle bone…”. Then, the Science teacher explained how we would just crumple to the ground if all we had were “dem dry bones”. That was her lead-in to teach us about muscles, cartilage, ligaments and all things dealing with connective tissue. We touched each bone as we sang about it and jumped around excitedly. A true blend of visual, tactile, kinesthetic, and musical learning that I still remember to this day when so much other “stuff” I learned has disappeared from my brain.
I’ve just read the most recent Carnegie “challenge” paper: “Opportunity by Design: New High School Models for Student Success”. It’s a very thorough and insightful study that promotes a “push to redesign how schools actually work for students and teachers”. The paper synthesizes a great deal of background studies and then outlines the plans of The Opportunity by Design Initiative. According to the authors, this bold, new initiative (cue up the classroom teachers who in their role similar to that of the Chorus in a Greek tragedy cry out in unison: “Oh no, not another initiative!) will lead to:
The paper then proceeds to put forth an effective secondary school design that incorporates 10 integrated principles to meet the demands of the Common Core. The usual “ingredients” are present in the principles: rigor, efficiency, continuous improvement, data-driven, real-time feedback. I am impressed by the work of all who participated in this paper. And I am left with one fundamental question: Where’s the connective tissue?
In my role as the Director of Education at the National School Climate Center, I have become accustomed to hearing from district leaders, principals, and teachers that this emphasis on social/emotional/civic learning and school climate improvement are the “soft side” of education. Even when there is a modicum of acceptance of the now myriad studies (highly rigorous, data-driven, and with real-time feedback!) proving that by concentrating on how school climate will deepen and broaden encouragement, support and rewards for student development and achievement, there is a relegation to the dustbin of “extras” for all things school climate based. Many still view school climate as merely “window dressing”.
For a while, the value of school climate improvement was embraced by some simply in the guise of anti-bullying efforts. Quickly, these disjointed, “one off” initiatives showed that bullying was and is pretty much a “canary in the coal mine”. School communities rapidly figured out that if there were issues of bullying, it pointed to deeper issues of power, privilege, social inequity, lack of transparency, lack of student voice, teacher dissatisfaction, a lack of students feeling safe and supported, undue emphasis on standardized tests, and data that is used to punish and demean (in direct contrast to our approach at NSCC to use data as a “flashlight” rather than as a “hammer”). And yet, it is quite evident from the Carnegie challenge paper that we still might not be ready to approach school climate improvement efforts as an integral part of school reform that can only serve to promote innovative and successful secondary school designs. This is, in fact, the “connective tissue” that brings together the disparate elements of incorporating the Common Core, using human capital strategically, giving schools robust methods to integrate positive youth development, and promoting student engagement in their academic success.
It is disheartening to see that strong research and bold attempts to create new high school models for student success don’t capitalize explicitly and systemically on the principles of school climate improvement. It’s still remains personally disheartening for me to work collegially and rigorously with schools on social/emotional/civic education only to be “disinvited” from the building during the “high holy days” of standardized testing. Our Comprehensive School Climate Inventory (CSCI), a powerful tool that measures school climate across eight different dimensions and captures the voices of all students, family members, and school staff, inevitably elucidates shortcomings by not incorporating this connective tissue in a school or district. And it also provides a pretty clear road map of just how to capitalize on this most important element of our schools so as to improve academics, increase graduation and school success rates, and create school communities where all are given the chance to excel. Additionally, The National School Climate Center (NSCC) just launched a series of School Climate Practice Briefs—Practices for Implementation and Sustainability— that present the latest in research and best practice for effective school climate reform from leading experts. The 11 issues selected to be included in this set of Practice Briefs are based on NSCC’s decade-long work with the entire academic community—teachers, staff, school-based mental health professionals, students and parents—to improve a climate for learning. The Briefs and the CSCI also have a fairly apparent intrinsic message…something is amiss with education reform that ignores the context of relationships and teaching/learning. Something is quite wrong with refusing to recognize that the important competencies our students and graduates need to secure/enhance college and career readiness are the social-emotional, civic and moral skills. If we continue to launch initiatives that promote only thin portions of the entirety of school reform needs and ignore the role of school climate, we do so at our own peril. We are setting ourselves up to have our efforts crumple into a pile like “dem dry bones”.