The tyrannical
teens: a guide to the Ten Tenets of the
Teen Condition.
Or how to develop SOLE in your program.
The secret
of eternal youth is arrested development.
Alice Roosevelt Longworth (1884 - 1980)
Don’t you just cringe
when you hear those, usually aging white Anglo-Celtic conservative voting
republican or Capital L Liberals Christians (am I stereotyping so early in an
opinion piece?), who start a rant or monologue with “kids these days” or “when
I was their age…..?” Well, let’s think about this.
Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for
authority; they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of
exercise; they no longer rise when elders enter the room; they contradict their
parents, chatter before company; gobble up their food and tyrannize their
teachers….
Of course this is a well-recognised,
loved and used quote usually attributed to Socrates or Plato from around 400BC and
it seems to find more favour in older folk like, well, us! The point being that
in reality, the teen condition or “psycho-social” stage of development of the
teen is as old as humanity itself. It is the industrial and post-industrial
response to it and how society is organised that is making trouble for us and
“them”.
If we think briefly about the
industrial period mentioned above, it may be helpful to explain these
circumstances. There have been several “revolutions” in human history. They all
revolve more or less around these fundamental discoveries:
·
Development of implements and then (Powered) machinery
are considered the most important change in the various revolutions and ages
(stone, bronze, iron) and Industrial Revolution, without these it would not have
happened.
·
The Factory System, concentration of a workforce
in one place and the dismantling of subsistence and then serf systems. The then
development of a Disciplined-based workforce. De-skilling. Skilled labour,
mostly male, replaced by women and children.
·
New Towns. Factories located near power
supplies, water, coal. New social arrangements
·
Cheap goods. Mass production brought about a
massive reduction in costs. The quality of factory produced goods was often
better than the hand-produced equivalent.
·
New types of job. Engineers. Factory managers.
Knowledge worker in 21st century.
Within these changes we can identify
similar changes in recent industrialisation that are still affecting us today
such as the knowledge and communication revolutions. It should be noted that
there have been power revolutions that have included, if we went back to
antiquity, the discovery of fire, then in industrial times to steam,
electricity and more recently gasoline and maybe soon more sustainable forms.
The rest flows on.
What isn’t often referred to is the
development of communication: think of the earliest guttural utterances of our
friend, Arg, in his cave. Actually not too different to that that emerges from
my kids or our students. But, as language developed, so did commerce and trade
and with the development of trade came a need for numeracy and accountability
and so on.
Have a look at the Armstrong and Miller
Show show cave-man film clip here.
See link to YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytgDuV0qOBI
The stone-age did not end because of a
lack of stones! Nor has the teenage condition ended due to a lack of teens! Nor
has it ended or begun due to the changes the social and industrial arrangements
of contemporary society.
The reason I briefly explain this
potted history of the world is to put in perspective that the teen condition
has remained a psychological and physiological stage of development that has
not resulted from the post-industrial time. Further, it is worth considering
the impact of this on education systems per se.
Our current education system is the
product of the post-industrial, colonial-empire model of the world and is
founded on constructs of the age of enlightenment. The empire was an astounding
time in humanity: the colonial world built the world’s largest computer at that
time: the bureaucracy! Bureaucrats and the system they served were a
fundamental part of the success of the colonial era. Information could be
processed and passed-on, albeit initially in writing and on paper then
subsequently using telegraphy and decisions made that were consistent anywhere
in the colonial world. It was the internet of the time.
That internet of that time needed fresh
and renewable components and the system that was created to feed the system was
the mass and unilateral education system as we know it today. The bureaucracy
needed literate and numerate nodes (OK, people!) who could be placed anywhere in
the empire and read, write, communicate and interpret directives. It didn’t
matter that the person was educated in New Zealand, Norfolk, Sydney or Bombay.
It was the age of enlightenment and those who “knew” had the tasks of opening
the lids of the heads of those who need the information poured into it to have
it filled-up! The “system” was hungry for components.
The education system of the time was
created to fill that need that 18th and 19th century
model to feed the growing needs of the bureaucratic empire. It didn’t matter
that it was English, French, German or Dutch, the system was basically
appropriated from Germany or more specifically Bismarck’s Prussia. So if you
wonder why we still persist with ringing bells, disciplined-based learning
arrangements and groupings based on year-of-manufacture (birth date), it’s due
to an industrial model of education: blame it on the Prussians! No, blame it on
us for maintaining it and continuing to feed the hungry beast that is our
“system” whether that is capitalist, empire, colonial or post-modern!
So where did the teens go in all this?
They went to work, essentially, as soon as possible and of course initially in
small places where their physical size was an advantage! Up chimneys, inside
boilers, inside ships hulls to hold rivets and all the horrible tasks that the
industrial age could use them for. All that transition and “it takes a village
to raise a kid” notion was lost.
Traditionally, as in traditional cultures, the era of the “teen” per se
was a short period of time, a few years at most due to the burden of the
growing increasingly hungry and unproductive person on a family or society.
Families and communities could not afford to have dependent young adults who
behaved like kids. They needed them to become independent and productive, and
reproductive I might add! There needed to be a definitive and clear point at
which a person became an adult and was expected to behave as an adult. Here’s
how it was done.
In almost all traditional cultures everywhere across the globe,
adolescents marked the transition by significant rituals. They often undertook difficult
journeys into the natural and unfamiliar environment with significant adult
mentors at about “that age”, teenage or adolescence. They learnt the ways of
their world, undertook dangerous, physical and emotional challenges. It might
have involved a “vision quest”, the “conquering of a local physical obstacle, a
mountain, jumping from a tower with vines attached to one’s feet and so on. It
is currently known as a rite of passage.
The term
rite of passage was coined by Belgian folklorist
Arnold Van Gennep (1960) to describe ritualized transition between significant
life stages. Writing at the beginning of the 20th century, Van Gennep divided
the ceremonies associated with such transitions into three categories:
rites
of separation, describing the passage out of a previous form or social
category;
rites of transition, emphasizing an ambiguous threshold phase
which he termed the
liminal stage; and
rites of incorporation, stressing
the re-entry into a new and clearly defined stage or phase. Van Gennep argued
that this triplicate pattern provides an underlying ritual structure with an
unvarying sequence, stating “the underlying arrangement is always the same.
Beneath a multiplicity of forms, either consciously expressed or merely
implied, a typical pattern always recurs: the pattern of the rites of passage”
Society today as a rule does not provide this ritual delineation from
child to adult. Education today needs to provide teenagers with a rite of
passage. That should be the fundamental aim of the teenage education programs
for this age group. Later, I shall share some key observations of what to
include in that educational rite of passage, and why. It is about creating SOLE
in education!
The rite of passage has clearly defined stages around preparation,
separation and reintegration and all need to be marked ceremonially and with
rituals. They need to be explicit and wonderful! We know what teens do when we
do not provide rituals and ceremony, rites and scarring for them, they (as in
teenagers) do it themselves. They do it as teenagers can, usually a little
dangerously, riskily, often inappropriately and secretly. They pierce
themselves and cover themselves in body art as an external expression of their
coming of age and departure from childhood. They all try to look the same to
express their individuality! It involves pain! How romantically antiquated and
prehistoric! They train surf, they get drunk, binge-drink, dabble with drugs
and all the stuff that a poorly developed frontal lobe will NOT discourage them
to do!
One vital and important part of the rite is the “liminal” stage. The time
of “limbo”. Actually my blog spot is called Liminal Learning so if you are keen
to read more of my thoughts type that into your favourite search engine
.
Liminality is something we see teens doing almost on a daily basis, by
themselves and is usually the reason we hear teachers and parents plead with me
to “fix them up”, something is wrong. Well, actually, this is normal teen
behaviour, they are actually neurologically in limbo and it is not helped by
the numbing curriculum being dealt them. See Ted Talks Sir Ken Robinson!
Teen years at school need to be renamed as PIVOTAL Years. We have to get
this right. We must have a PIVOTAL year’s program that takes account of the
neurological stage of development, the Liminality of their emotional and
developmental state and that takes them explicitly through the stages and out the
other side to functional adult-like behaviour or social competence. The
successful completion of the “rite” would allow progression into the stage of
life we call adulthood, with expectations of adult-like behaviours, speech,
attitudes and values. Great rituals and marking, often physical marking and
scarring should take place. Amazingly, traditional cultures recognized this
stage and dealt with it very quickly and effectively: as noted, they couldn’t
afford to have hungry demanding half-men and half-women dependent on the
community for long!
To successfully address the PIVOTAL Years’ needs, education needs to
recognise the psycho-social stage of adolescence and respond accordingly.
Later, I will introduce the Ten Tenets of Tyrannical Teens as the basis of how
to organise your SOLE: Socially Organised Learning Environments. Yes,
education today needs SOLE to address the Pivotal Years.
As the Alpine School
has operated for the last ten years, a research relationship has developed and
thrived with Monash University, Gippsland. A number of academic papers have
been published on the outcomes of that research, which has primarily been
scrutinising outcomes of the program in terms of leadership, self-efficacy,
student perceptions, leadership, and parent opinion among others. The papers
have been developed around a range of contemporary educational constructs. They
are all published, reviewed and available.
What has become
increasingly apparent with the progress of the Alpine School is that a core
academic and moral purpose has become much more clearly defined. The construct
that has become part of the school’s educational discourse has involved these
key factors:
·
The middle years of school for most students are
a tumultuous time in psycho-social-neuro development and the education system
has in most part struggled to meet these needs or provide this as the core of
the moral purpose.
·
Middle year’s learners are often characterised
by the need to undertake integrated learning based on an enquiry model, self-directed,
with tangible action outcomes. This is the model of Community based learning
that has been the cornerstone of the Alpine model of curriculum. This model
essentially is more engaging and encourages the enquiry and ingenuity which is
a characteristic of the adolescent developing brain. It is also a very social
learning model, again an essential characteristic of the adolescent learner
whose need to belong and contribute to the tribe is inherent.
·
Students have been at school for ten years at
this stage of their educational journey and are often disengaged due to the
repetition inherent in that system.
·
The author uses the metaphor of long service
leave as appropriate for the middle-years students, for the same reasons we
value it as an industry construct. They’ve been at it for ten years and deserve
a break!
·
Adolescent psychologists describe the need for
connection with significant adult role models at this age and stage of life:
many students attach themselves to and idolise various rock stars, athletes,
teachers, scout leaders or youth group leaders and sporting personalities at
this age. If a connection is not made that is meaningful, adolescents can often
make inappropriate connections. Similarly, inappropriate predator behaviour
capitalises on this need and drive in teens to seek to associate with an adult
role model.
·
Adolescents seek to belong and comply for the
most part at this stage, be members of and accepted by “the tribe”. If an appropriate
“tribe” lead by the adult mentor noted above is not found, adolescents can
associate with inappropriate tribes, gangs, mobs and meet the need in these
ways. It is difficult for an education system to meet that need in its current
construct. Adolescents will seek out membership of a tribe and seek out their
own ritual passage if we as an education system do not provide it.
·
In meeting that need to belong and be mentored,
it appears that part of the need of adolescents is a requirement to undertake a
significant ritualism in some way to prove and become acceptable to the
“tribe”. (Note, I have read a paper on Incarceration of Indigenous males in NT
describing this as the “new rite of passage” for these young men in these
communities). This has become widely described as a “rite of passage”, as noted
above. Indeed, many traditional societies and communities recognised this and
the needs were met by the adolescent undertaking a significant journey away
from the home community with significant non-family adult mentors. These
journeys often involved ritualism, sharing of knowledge pertinent to gender and
place, and may have been in some part unpleasant or even painful, involving
cicatrisation or ritual scarring to prove the requirements of the journey had
been met.
·
Upon return to the community, the adolescents
were normally welcomed as adults and expected to behave and contribute as such
to the community. Ritualization of the return was critical to the completion
and return.
What has become apparent to the
author after observing the progress of the Alpine School and the through-put
and output over ten years is that a rite of passage does indeed take place in
the progress of a student through the program. Further research
has revealed precious little in-depth research on the topic, not surprisingly
as the residential experience of education is still relatively small. In
developing the SOLE, a Rite of Passage is a crux of the experience. However,
the discussions and research, plus personal experience suggest a rite of
passage has three characteristics:
·
Separation from that which is familiar, family,
community and the normal and expected support structures for that young person.
·
A “liminal" stage, or the time of “limbo”.
Limbo is an apt description of the stage that is the centre of the rite of
passage experience. It is the time of transformation, and as a school that
purports to provide leadership education, this is the crux of the experience or
our core moral purpose. In this transformational stage, the adolescent is
literally deconstructed, their very world and belief/value structure challenged
and reformed. This is the essence of transformational leadership. It is this
rather than the teaching of, for example leadership models or leadership
styles, that is the core of leadership education!
·
The third characteristic of a rite involves
reintegration to that place and community from which the person has come. This
is the significantly challenging period as the realignment of a ritualistically
transformed adolescent into the pre-existing home/school/friendship/life
situation can cause a great deal of anxiety, upheaval and distress for the
young person. It is sometimes described as a re-birthing, with the pain
associated with a “birth”.
·
This reintegration phase is often the stage
schools struggle to deal with. It is partly from a misunderstanding that from
the experience the student has been “fixed-up” or the work has already been
done while away. Our research has shown that the reintegration has to happen
after the separation stage and at a time of reconstruction into the normal
life, not while away. Schools need to reframe the expectation of the returning
student (in much the same way society has had to reframe the expectation of a
returning soldier after a period of war: research into this phenomenon is
current in Nth America with Outward Bound working with dysfunctional returned
servicemen and women, and in Israel with post compulsory military service).
So all this information is rather
fascinating to be sure, but WHAT is it we as educators need to specifically do?
Elsewhere in another paper I have authored I refer to NAPLAN being replaced by
NAPE testing-National Assessment Program Engagement. That would help for a
start, begin testing and measuring engagement rather than the outcomes of
education which should be literate, numerate and socially competent young
adults.
But the key for schools and us now is
to create for teens what I call SOLEs: Socially Organised Learning
Environments. They can happen and do happen in schools and I think the School
for Student Leadership does have SOLE as a core of its operation and belief and
value systems. I would like to share then the ten tenets for tyrannical teens
in arranging a SOLE.
1.
Teens are social learners. They love being together.
The reason they go to school is not because math (I might offend all the math
teachers in the audience therefore stereotyping math as a subject majority of
students hate whereas the subject hatred is usually linked to the teacher and
the delivery!) is so engaging. When we establish learning programs they it
needs to be addressing the fact that teens love to be together. They are
tribal. They want to express their rugged individuality by looking and sounding
the same as each other. Actually this trait disappears in latter teen life only
to reappear in mid-life crisis as middle-aged men express their individuality
by buying Harley-Davidson Motorcycles and all trying to look the same-AGAIN!.
In fact, the teen boy predisposition to growing breasts and fatty deposits
around their girth at puberty, which does disappear, returns at forty!
a.
What we need to do is create learning and
co-dependency in the operation of the instructional model.
b.
SOLE schools will and do recognise and
capitalise on the social drive that teens have. They want to be together!
Separate them form others and keep us all safer!
c.
This can create safe places, boundaries,
edges and containment.
d.
Schools and facilities need to have
hierarchies of spaces that allow for transition into and out of larger and
smaller places that both unambiguously provide cues to acceptable behaviour and
yet require students to think about their behaviour in them.
e.
We have an opportunity, especially in
residential and outdoor educational settings, to provide links and parallels
with spaces, behaviours, dress, language, mores, volume, actions, proximity,
intimacy and more!
f.
This opportunity to provide learning and
instruction, either explicitly or experientially, is unique! The instructional
model is about CODE SWITCHING.
g.
Code switching is a sophisticated response
that most adults can read and respond to but teens need explicit facilitation
or instruction about.
h.
In a SOLE school, students will learn and
know what language to use, when they can swear and with whom, what clothes to
wear (or not as in the case of showering of course!), how loud to speak, how to
or if to hit on someone or if not there and then where and how…and so on.
i.
The capitalisation of the social learning
predisposition has been at odds with traditional modes of educational delivery:
that Prussian-Colonial model described earlier. This model tends to subjugate
and crush individuality and separate and divide subjects. Integrated
curriculum!
2.
Students love rituals, and ceremonies. Use
rituals. Make them up if necessary. Society hinges on birth, marriage, puberty,
onset of menses, ceremonies that punctuate our lives are equally important to
teens. Think of Hogwarts and Harry Potter: teens love the thought of being part
of the tribe and belonging especially if it is slightly edgy or naughty.
a.
Mark and punctuate significant events with
rituals. It is decidedly difficult for teens to express themselves at the best
of times, let alone when it comes to new and awkward social and emotional
issues. Guide them through these with communal rites: I love the recent
rock/stick/leave idea for departure ceremony at our council fire provided by
one of my staff. “Bring a stick to represent what I am going to stick with,
bring a rock representing what was hard and a leaf to represent what I’m going
to leave behind”.
b.
Play games and invent them to demonstrate the
difficult to explain: we’ll show you a couple. See below. We will do some!
c.
Use fires, circles, dress-up, capes,
appropriate concepts (appropriately) from cultures you are familiar with. I use
a lot of Canadian First Nation rituals and constructs and explain that is where
they came from.
d.
Australian Indigenous culture has many
constructs and ideas that are accessible for use in schools. They also provide
an opportunity to share cultural artefacts and practices.
e.
Most of all make them fun and enjoyable!
3.
Teens are religious and say a special, secret
prayer every day. I can now reveal that prayer to you. “Please god, don’t let
anything embarrassing happen to me today”. Do stuff that takes them into their
discomfort gradually. Set-up real-life circumstances that allow them to try on
the new sets of clothes and identities in safe social settings.
a.
. Developing resilience in our kids? Take a
bit of a ‘well what’s the worst thing that can happen’ approach with students
so that in the event of not succeeding it isn’t seen as the end of the world.
The adults in their lives need to be able to have a laugh too, particularly at
themselves, and not cringe, pull faces and be vocally judgemental. Yep sure
there is a time and place to have conversations about choices- open, honest
conversations, not hypocritical (the old do as I say not as I do) type
conversations. It’s difficult because we want our children to forge their own
identities, to be individuals (or not), to make their own choices- we need to
listen- different from hearing- and as in times past share our own stories
warts and all without it ending up as a ‘when I was your age’ monologue- not an
easy thing to do.
b.
Teen suicide is an issue too which is why
resilience needs to be factored in- how often do you hear of the young man who
splits with the GF and is found hanging the next day (rural Australia is
notorious for this type of permanent solution to ‘temporary’ setbacks)
4.
NDD is real. Read Richard Louv’s work and
apply the learning from Louv’s work in your program. The crux of Louv’s work is
around reconnecting young people with the natural world, or counter to this is
addressing the disconnection from the natural world that the contemporary
post-industrial society and the resultant structures have created. How
many readers have become familiar with Richard Louv and his construct on Nature
Deficit Disorder? The more we compartmentalise, control, disconnect and
dehumanise kids and their learning, the more sick they get. Sounds like Sir Ken
Robinson…They get sick of school, too. We have to stop ordering and
stage-managing kids’ lives. They need to get dirty, they need to play and they
need to do it now. They need to do it for real and not on line and not through
an app. They need to stop being delivered especially in year or grade nine,
stuff that is not relevant and will not help them on their journey to becoming
a man or woman and being socially competent, or custodians, or just being well!
Get this book and read it: Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from
Nature Deficit Disorder. Then leave it on the staffroom table. Build
reading and understanding it into every performance plan of every teacher.
Richard and Sir Ken (Sir
Ken Robinson’s RS Animate)
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/ken_robinson_changing_education_paradigms.html
We are delivering a dull
content that is disengaging and numbing kids in an era when they are amped-up
and rearing to go. We anesthetise them with sometimes terrible pedagogy or dull
content. We ask them the stupid questions that we know the answers to…….and
success is determined by the individual’s ability to regurgitate ‘knowledge’
and ‘understanding’ that is acceptable to the person who ‘judges’ their work.
OK, so a teaching in a year 8 class asks the kid at the back “What’s
the capital of France”? If they are lucky they might get back “F”. If they are
not careful they’ll get back “Gee miss, I wish I had your problems……….”
And we tell them not to
ask the answer of their friend because that is cheating-in life its called
collaboration. And then when they get too excited we have a drug regime prescribed
just in case they don’t comply and call them ADD….see YouTube clip of this
student telling the teacher a thing or two!
Perhaps the most
disturbing aspect of the current trend that Louv identifies is deeply related
to the next discussion about the urbanisation of the world population.
Increasingly young people are becoming sick as a result of the disconnection
from the natural world, says Louv. The trend away from Outdoor Education is
disturbing: it is currently overlooked in the National Curriculum, as I
understand. Are we becoming so risk averse that getting kids into the outdoors
is now too dangerous? Is the trend toward testing and scores so important that
we program every moment of a young man’s or woman’s day? Is it because we
apparently cannot measure on metrics the benefits of Outdoor education that it
is becoming less important? When we are disconnected from the natural world, we
acquire illnesses of contemporary society like depression. “Suicide was the
15th most common cause of death in 2011 and the 10th leading cause for males.
Males account for approximately three quarters of suicide deaths and it remains
the leading cause of death for males aged 15-44”
.
The prognosis for young men with severe depression and bi-polar disorder is in
my recent experience as bad or worse that someone with the likes of cancer.
And, unfortunately, the pathology of cancer for example is far more easily
identified and removed than that of depressive illnesses. Depression is such an
unglamorous illness. The implications of disconnecting young people from the
natural world in terms of real world, holistic wellbeing, is measureable, Louv
has the data to support this. Kids get sick and depressed when separated from
the natural world, from un-programmed play, from such incidental interactions
with the natural world or nature per se.
If it is considered too
dangerous to expose our students to the outdoors, then I ask that we do some
serious analysis on the death-rate due to suicide in young people that may be
attributable to disconnection: from possibly the things that I believe can make
them well, that Louv identifies and Sir Ken addresses.
Let’s look at the current world
situation. The nature of the world is urban:
o
80% of the world population lives in cities.
o
The 20% who don’t live in cities retain 80% of
the diversity of language and live in and connect with the most bio-diverse
environments in the world.
o
Nearly 50% of Australians live in Melbourne,
Sydney and Brisbane!
My dear friend and
researcher in Calgary Alberta, David Lertzman, is publishing research on the
correlation between linguistic, cultural and environmental diversity. You can’t
save one without them all. These concepts and constructs are not mutually exclusive.
You tackle one you tackle them all. His work takes him between the marginalised
northern Alberta First Nation communities and bands on reservations directly
impacted by the oil-sands extraction there. This is juxtaposed by his work with
Amazon first nation people in Brazil and the impact of timber and other
extractive industries.
If we pursue the Louv construct, is this what has
happened to Maslow?
5.
Teens focus on “having”, the immediate need
to acquire and possess. They want to HAVE it all as soon as possible. The focus
needs to be made to “be” and “do” as the transitions to “having”. If we can
change the focus for teens onto what you have to “do” and what you have to “be”
a.
Create classes and activities that focus on
the future self that are about being and doing rather than accumulating or
having. Be socially competent, do your homework, be organised, be on time, do
your duties and so on. Then teens will have the respect and admiration they
deserve and want.
6.
We need to give teenagers responsibility. Curriculum
needs to be project-based and have real, tangible outcomes. Some call it
authentic curriculum. The devil makes work for idle hands! When any of us have
responsibility taken away, the result is we behave irresponsibly. The ultimate
expression of this is institutionalisation of long-term inmates of prisons or
other state-controlled institutions. Similarly, in our programs, we need to
set-up students to become independent not dependent on us. Therefore, a good
deal of the program time with us needs to focus on departure and return. We
need to get that right while they are with us.
a.
The counter punch is the risk of mistakes, of
the shirkers, the under-the-radar flyers. Keep them visible and accountable.
Have faith in the strength of the community and the strong sense of social
justice….next point indeed!
7.
Teens have a highly tuned sense of justice,
want to make a difference and learn by doing. Teens have highly tuned antenna
about when things “are not fair”, when somebody has had a miscarriage of
justice perpetrated on them or someone else. It is imperative to be able to
clearly explain ones thinking when it comes to addressing behaviours.
a.
Have a set of organisational or community
values established. Use activities to establish the values and make it into a
compact/contract/MOU and have all student participants sign the document.
Display in publicly and refer to it. Have your staff walk the talk too- nothing
gets up their noses more than them having to do xyz and the ‘adults’ then doing
the exact opposite!
b.
Establish a student council or justice
system. Get them to sit and assist in ascertaining behaviour, indiscretions,
and punitive processes.
c.
Be able to explain your decisions. Think out
aloud so to speak so students understand how you arrived at a point of view.
8.
Teenage attention span is their age plus
three in minutes. Lessons and learning times need to be grouped around these
times. Make breaks regular. Do many things at once or one thing at a time:
decide this based upon the individuals.
a.
Windows OS and iOS are great platforms for
allowing kids today to multi-task.
b.
However, like all of us, kids have preferred
and priority tasks: most see iTunes as the priority task although it is in fact
the preferred task!
c.
Chunk information. Keep on one topic and
delineate the change in idea.
d.
Take time to allow responses. Film yourself
teaching. Audit who you question and how. Time with a stopwatch the period from
asking a question to answering it yourself! Mostly we do this: we rarely allow
enough time to allow a question to be processed in a students’ mind and then
for them to formulate a response. How many times have we heard a student
respond, when asked, “Sorry I didn’t hear you”? Plenty! What are they saying?
They are religious (see rule above) and do not want to be embarrassed or it is
less embarrassing to admit this than answer incorrectly OR they really DID NOT
HEAR? And you know why they did not hear? Because they have limited or less
capacity to listen/process/comprehend/formulate an opinion/raise hand/put idea
into comprehendible speech….THEY DO NOT HEAR!
e.
We adults do the same thing- how often have we
gone to a conference and nobody wants to answer the question for fear of being
‘wrong’ in front of their peers and colleagues- maybe I am the exception!
9.
Catch them doing the right thing and see it
for yourself. Choose the battle-no kid in my experience, ever died of a dirty
or untidy bedroom for example. Make the battles worth it: don’t disregard the
issues, but choose when to have them and what to make the big issue about. If
we escalate the small stuff into big issues, for example make a huge fuss over
a small transgression like swearing or such, what will you do/ where do you go
when something REALY big happens.
a.
It is so easy to only see the stuff teens do
that drives US MAD! They leave stuff everywhere, they are late, they talk
inappropriately, they respond rudely if at all, they stay up late and get out
of bed late, they do not plan for the stuff they need tomorrow, they forget
what they did today, they don’t plan for next week or next term let alone
tomorrow, they day dream,….all the stuff that PLATO noted! That’s why our
parents in our school are so happy for us to somehow “fix them up” as if this
is all an incredible pox on the teens that needs some medication administered
to cure it.
b.
All the stuff we see is NORMAL TEENAGE BEHAVIOUR.
Keep this in mind: it doesn’t mean it’s ok or acceptable, but it is not
personal. It is not done as a morning pact to get to you. They say the Morning
Prayer but not the morning list of people to annoy that day. Take them to task
and sometimes step over the jocks and socks. Remember, annoying to many of us
as it is, no kid died of an untidy bedroom!
c.
We acknowledged this in our program and
recognised that the floordrobe was
more used than the wardrobe. We just didn’t bother with them at our second and
third campuses. We provide fish-bins that sometimes contain items of clothing,
sometimes ordered and sometimes organised. Sometimes the clean-up involved
shovelling the pile from the floor into the fish bin.
d.
The main point is shift the eye and one’s
attention to the good stuff that is done, the improvements, the things that are
better. I am justifiably accused from my own kids of never seeing the good
stuff they do (god I do look hard sometimes to find it!) but we cloud our view
of our students by focusing on their attention to ADLs (activities of daily
living). Does it matter if their shoes are untied, wrong laces, unbrushed
hair…?
e.
Choose the battle. If we make a huge ado
about the socks and jocks, what do we do when something really important
happens? Where do we go?
10.
The Teen experience is now a 10-plus year
protracted event-no SAGA! We need to do something in society to punctuate it
and mark the end of childhood and the start of adulthood. We need to circumvent
the self-administered rites that teens today subscribe to mark their ritual
progression. With the adult opportunities there needs to be a closer link to
the adult responsibilities and obligations. We have opportunities in our
programs to make closer links to adult-like behavioural expectations and mores.
We also need to model those and explicitly instruct them. We need to use
rituals and ceremonies more effectively following experiences, to signify the
end of one phase and the start of another.
a.
It is not practically possible to foreshorten
the teen experience but it is possible to create SOLE in our schools that will
deliberately and explicitly focus on the rite of passage that is the transition
from child to adult.
b.
Why not test it? I propose the NAPLAN become
NAPE-National Assessment Program ENGAGEMENT.
c.
DO something different in education, do it
tomorrow when you get back. Be bold and be excited.
d.
Have gender-specific activities and focuses
in the program that converge on “what it is to be a man or woman” discussions.
Be bold and brave in curriculum and instructional design.
e.
Year nine students have only been at school
in the 21st Century. Let’s give ‘em some 21st Century
learning!
In summary: things have got to change.
Schools have to change. Why can’t we learn anywhere anytime? Why do kids have
to spend set times at schools on set days? Why do we still subscribe a
post-industrial, Prussian model of education?
Create the school and program that is
SOLE for teens: a social organised learning environment. Do it by following the
ten tenets;
1.
Recognise that teens love being together,
have diverse social and emotional needs, need to get away from what they have
been doing for ten years at school, has complex real-life issues as part of the
learning, has adult-like responsibilities, creates celebrations and rituals and
encourages special relationships with adults outside family.
2.
Use rituals and ceremony to mark events,
times, successes and weigh-points in experiences. Make then fun and authentic,
genuine and with certificates!
3.
Create resilience in the students by
deliberate and uncomfortable circumstances that students have to respond to.
These should be then facilitated to reflect potential real-life situations.
4.
Connect young people with the nature world.
Create opportunities for unstructured play. Be in beautiful places and use them
for reflection time: we call it “Spirit Spot”. Read Last Child in the Woods.
5.
Shift the focus for teens from the immediate
and “have” to the “what do I have to be and do”. Use good goal setting and
facilitated processes to do this.
6.
Make curriculum engaging and connected. Give
them real responsibility.
7.
Set up student justice committees, council
chambers, decision making bodies. Show them fun and tangible processes to make
decisions and learn processes that may be transferable to later life and that
outside school life.
8.
Understand attention spans in teens. Chunk
learning and allow time to consider and answer. AND ask valid and true
questions that you as teacher do not know the answer to and WAIT for the answer!
Be liberal and contemporary in the approach to use of technology BUT by the
same token set boundaries and limits.
9.
Don’t beat them up over everything…I am so
guilty of this. Tyr TRY to see the great stuff they do and acknowledge them.
Choose the time to point out the bad stuff. Don’t descend to the “and while I’m
on it, let’s talk about the other ten things I hate about you” syndrome….At
school, as a teacher, it is so easy to be the emotional coke-bottle that every
teen gives a shake and it’s the last one that cops the wrath!
10.
Do something in your program that focuses on
rites. Make it clear that there is a destination and outcome to what is
happening and that is the rest of your life as an adult!
The way to create SOLE in education,
Socially Organised Learning Environments, is to follow the above principals.
Make school like life, the preferred place to be. Give education SOLE! You can
do it, do it NOW!
Mark Reeves.
Activities
Here
is a brief summary and lesson plan for a couple of the activities.
Let’s do something active. This will require participation and action.
Sounds like curriculum should be Heh?! Today we are going to do some NAPLAN
practice. We will focus on geometric shapes. Firstly Circles then Triangles,
lastly matrices…..
The Circle of Life
Using the 15m long, tubular climbing sling that you conveniently have in
your pack, and the culturally appropriate spear, we are ready to go. Check your
sling knot!
1.
Arrange the sling on the ground in the circle
you wish the group to make and stab the spear into the ground in the centre of
the circle. It needs to be a tubular climbing sling 15m in length tied with a
tape-know.
2.
Get the group to form a circle and hold the
climbing sling. They are SO strong a group of 30 or 40 will not break it
3.
Lean back hold on, feel the stretch of the sling
and the balance of the group.
4.
Let the group wave and wallow in and out.
5.
Ask the group to focus on keeping the spear in
the centre of the circle. Lean back, keep the focus on the spear.
6.
Begin a monologue along these lines…
a.
I want to take you on a mind journey…..close
your eyes…
b.
We are a circle gathered together today here
held and supported by each other and the fabric of the sling.
c.
The sling may represent the social bonds and
social capital that unites and forms or defines our communities, families,
societies and world.
d.
Lean back and feel how we support each other.
e.
Try to focus on the spear, the circle the
support.
f.
Life is a circle. We end in the same place we
started.
g.
The world is a circle, roughly, spinning in a
roughly circular orbit around our circular sun. Most terrestrial bodies move in
roughly circular orbits apart from their gravitational attractions.
h.
When a society is in balance, it supports and
can cope with the disruption of subversion or adversity. Here we can ask one
person to try to take the group in another direction by themselves by pulling
or pushing. No way. The ring will not move.
i.
Ask those with a common birth month (November?)
for example to try to take the group in another direction. Because they are
dispersed and uncoordinated, they will be ineffective.
j.
Talk about the fact that our very being and life
is maintained by a “circulatory system” that moves our life blood round and
round.
k.
Now ask someone to go into the middle and move
the spear off-centre. Get the whole group to focus on the new position of the
spear and, staying tight and connected, move themselves and consequently the
whole circle into a position such that the spear is now again the centre of the
circle.
l.
The group will move, magically, silently, into a
position such that the spear is centre.
m.
Question this phenomenon in relation to group
goals, to clarity of purpose, to focus and centred common belief. Let
participants explore their feelings about this event.
n.
There may be other facilitated discussions that
can come out of this experience.
o.
Some will now complain that the tape is hurting
their hands: use this as a metaphor for the pain and effort required to
maintain a community and the circle of our lives and connection.
p.
Explore and enjoy this simple activity with such
simple props!
The triangle-the strongest shape in geometry and
society!
1.
Identify two people on other tables around the
room. Note who they are and where. Anyone, particularly two unfamiliar but
intriguing people. Make them people unknown to you, one of different gender.
Don’t let them know. It is a secret.
2.
Are you all familiar with an equilateral
triangle?
a.
Well done, you are mouthing that it has equal
side lengths, equal internal angles that all add up to 1800
3.
Pretend you are viewing this triangle from
above, a birds-eye view.
4.
With you as one point in the triangle, and
unbeknown to the other two identified people, you must now accept this
challenge to arrange yourselves into a perfect equilateral triangle.
5.
You will need to get up and move.
6.
The other two identified people will not yet
know you have chosen them to be your corners.
GO
There will be minutes of chaos, some will be noisy, some will not
participate and just manipulate the situation so it is “easy” them, others will
comply and try, and try and keep trying and eventually give up. Some will just
do it so it is close enough.
I facilitate this activity by pretending I have a triangle APP on my
iPhone and will measure the accuracy of the triangles….do whatever it is fun!
When it has gone on long enough (you will know it’s long enough because
they will pretend to have completed the task and in reality it can’t ever be complete….),
call it to an end. Some groups will keep moving and moving and
moving…frustrating for all.
What’s the point? If possible, move about the room and ask for opinions,
reactions, interpretations…
They will be something at least like this and maybe more depending on the
group age and motivation:
·
Stupid they won’t stay still
·
I can’t control them
·
Why don’t they behave
·
Someone moves over there and caused my ally to
move….
·
The group keeps moving and so on….
The purpose of this activity is manifold! Triangles are the strongest
shape in engineering/math or whatever, and also the strongest shape in
community.
Triangles and this activity represent the fact that even though you think
you can control the others, maybe community or international opinions, they are
free agents whose movement and location is not determined by your values or
position but are influenced by things so far out of your control. However,
despite this, we are connected and whatever we do has a profound and direct or
indirect influence elsewhere.
Look at this picture of my beautiful bike. The world and life is a
circle, our lives are a circle, the earth and the sun are circles circulating
around an endless universe and the very life blood within us is a circulatory
system. It’s all held together by the strength of the connections of triangles!
Have a look at my bike:
Now, have a look at the basic front page of our current
favourite international connection tool:
We are connected and our curriculum needs to recognise this quick smart.
Community Web Activity.
Aim: To
undertake an engaging, kinaesthetic and concrete activity to help explain an
esoteric construct of community and leadership.
An excellent end of
week one activity to pre-empt the Community Agreement and Peer Skills Classes.
Can be undertaken in
half an evening class. Could also be redone with core or expo teams. Works well
in smaller groups individually rather than in pairs. Ideally 15 to 20
participants or pairs works.
Need: at least 4X30 meters of about 9 or 10 mm soft
nylon rope. Super Cheap Auto has it. Scrap paper, pens for each. Unfurl the
rope and roll up on a spool so when it is laid it is quick and without tangles!
This is important to move the elaborate
phase quickly to maintain momentum.
Engage: Form
the group into a circle. The activity can be done in the dining room of all
campuses if weather is foul. Play a circle clap game, circle thumbs game, pass
the hand squeeze game, hokey-pokey. Fun and active.
Explore: Sit in
the circle. Talk briefly about the concept of community: We are living in one.
Don’t dwell too long; let the activity and the long program do that over time.
This is an introductory powerful activity that can be referred to again and
again. Ask the students to identify a series of action or inactions, beliefs,
values, attitudes, words or verbalisations that one can see that help us
identify a healthy community. We will call these concepts or constructs.
Explain: Alone
first, write down the top five concepts you feel need to be in a community for
it to be healthy. It may take a prompt to get it going: ask a pre-warned staff
member in the class with you. They will helpfully answer “Respect”! Perfect.
Explain how important respect is in a healthy community. Let students now go to
write down their top five. They will then pair this to a paired top five. Need
to do so with a group of 45, it’s too big otherwise. 20 or so is a great size.
Go around the group.
Start at the student leader, as good as anywhere! When they share their
concept, maybe it is honesty for example, allow the group to agree this is a
good concept, and get the pair to write it nice a big on the sheet so it can be
seen.
Continue around the
group. If an already used concept is suggested, ask the pair to go to their
number two, or number three and so on. We will end up with 20 or more great
concepts that they have identified.
Elaborate: Now
the fun starts. Ask the group to agree what is the number one concept for a
healthy community. Often it is honesty, respect, equality and so on. Start
there. Get the pair to hold the end of the rope. Ask what that number one
concept best connects to: e.g. if it is respect, maybe it links to honesty.
Take the rope across; get the pair to hold the middle “bite”. Continue to weave
the rope across and back and forth until all the concepts are linked, all
student pairs have hold of the rope. An impressive web is formed. There will be
tugging, laughing, talking, and the web will be bucking and lifting…just don’t
trip. It’s all ok!
Now ask the student
leader(s) to come out to the middle and lay arms spread on the web. The circle
will stand up, pulling their rope-end tight. The person is lifted from the
floor! There will be much laughing, yelling, hilarity! Everyone will want a
turn.
With a complaint and
focussed group, one may then try two student leaders, then swap and see if
someone else would like a turn? Up to you, time and focus of the group.
If you have a compliant
group who is willing to keep the student elevated, one can then deconstruct the
community. As each essential piece is removed, with your descriptions and group
comments, the leaders will lower gently to the floor. The “community” has
collapsed!
Evaluate: This
is where one can facilitate a brief conversation about how it takes a community
of functional concepts, behaviours, attitudes, actions/inactions to be linked
in a constructive way. Moreover, only a healthy community can support
leadership-in this case our student leader.
Good luck, it is a
great activity and a powerful activity that will remain with the student long
after a discussion is forgotten!
Please use these
activities and facilitate them well! Enjoy them and if you like them
acknowledge where they came from!
