Tag: democratic schools

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education

A Team-Based Approach

I get paid to be the member of a team that is responsible for planning, organizing, coordinating, and implementing a self-designed educational model to a group of roughly 30 students who have been diagnosed with a range of cognitive, emotional, and/or behavioral disorders.

Depending on the ever-changing needs of the student body, the school employs between 20 and 25 staff members each quarter. About eight or nine of those staff members (myself included) serve on the leadership council for the school.

One of our duties is to determine how each of our staff members will be deployed. Before doing so, we invite staff members to suggest their own ideas and suggestions, and we invite each student to request opportunities that our staff can strive to fulfill.

As we develop ways to deploy the staff, the council takes into consideration the strengths and challenges of each student, as well as the strengths and challenges of each staff member. We use that knowledge to further the educational plans of the student.

We judge our decisions against the assumptions of our model. While the model was inspired by others, we designed it in-house and then corrected it through both observation and evolution (any change that didn’t survive in our environment…didn’t survive). It’s a process that requires significant time to compute, though it’s less computation and more of an art form; thankfully, our council seeks to honor the muse.

In addition to strategizing and implementing individual educational plans for each student, the council works to expand the potential of the school. We encourage an atmosphere of learning and growth by fostering professional-development opportunities for the staff and welcoming members of the local community to share their passions with our students and inspire the next generation.

At the same time, we work directly with students on almost a minute-by-minute basis, forcing us to divide our attention between strategy and delivery to a sometimes worrisome degree (hence the need to divide the weight of the mission throughout the entire team).

While we have an executive director who acts as the ultimate arbiter, the general give and take of the school’s progress is determined by anyone who cares to contribute. Staff members are invited to attend each strategy session, as are the students (we’ve had several take us up on the offer).

The result is a school that feels less like an institution and more like a living, breathing force that remains open to outside influence and yet confident of its general direction. Participating in that force, allowing its inspiration to move through me and back into it, and feeling its effects on my soul, is a true joy.

It has its frustrations, but the Buddha teaches that all life is struggle; and yet as we all know, our lives need not be devoid of joy. For every frustration we feel as team members, we feel as well the ultimate joy of its release: the deflation of tension, the expansion in coöperation, and the resultant celebration.

Frustration is present, yes, but thanks to the good will of the team members, frustration merely increases our probability of improving the school.

Our team-based approach to running the school allows every adult to connect with students on a regular basis, which reinforces our mission to keep the school student-focused (as opposed to staff-focused). We not only serve as administrators, but as teachers, advisors, and student-transport drivers. We step up as counselors, as first-aid deliverers, and as triggered-student deëscalators. As a member of the team, we must be immune to anything that would stand in the way of our kids and brave enough to jump into the breach to save them.

None of us would be able to do it alone, nor would we want to. We depend on each other and make ourselves dependable in turn.

We wouldn’t have it any other way.

Categories
education

Democratizing Justice in the Schools

My school has a judicial committee comprised entirely of students (and advised by a staff member). The judicial committee is charged with enforcing the rules of the school. It acts upon reports submitted by both staff and students, which allows students to settle their differences without the interference of a staff member (outside of the advisor, who doesn’t get a vote). The rules of the school, in their turn, have been determined by a congress comprised of both staff and students, with each member of the school receiving an equal vote, regardless of age, grade, or employment status.

In theory, this sounds great, but I fear that somewhere along the line, the adults in this relationship made a mistake.

I am a radical democratist: I put my faith in other people. I believe that all people have it within them to act faithfully and good, and that what people need more than almost anything else is to be heard. People who have a voice are people who want a choice, and putting people together in a room and asking them to be faithful and good is the best way to lay all of the available choices on the table.

When implementing our ideal judicial system at the school, us adults made (and continue to make) a mistake. While we allow the students to adjudicate issues related to minor annoyances, we shield them from the most serious issues facing our community. When there is a serious infraction against the community in our school, we don’t ask our students to deal with it themselves (advised by a staff member, of course); instead, we take it upon ourselves, imagining the students to be too delicate to handle any of our community’s “real” problems.

A case in point. At least once or twice a year, we have to evacuate a building because a student’s behavior threatens to turn violent. When this happens, the offending student’s consequences are determined by a team of staff members, and the students are asked to just go on their merry way.

Except of course, they don’t. They internalize the notion that their school is a place where violence can always happen, and that when it does, it will be dealt with by someone else, and that despite their own concerns and interests, no one will ever consider their ideas or opinions on the matter.

If that isn’t horrible training for life in a democratic society, then I don’t know what is.

Imagine a school where even the biggest issues are brought to the students to deal with, not in terms of a shame circle or anything like that, but in terms of [restorative justice](https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/restorative-justice-overview/), which asks offenders to repair their harm to the victim and to the community. Schools should not hide a whole level of learning and wisdom from their students, one that forces them to face their community’s real situations and to work them through together.

A challenge to this approach comes from the concept of privacy. At what point does an individual’s privacy outweigh the loss of the community’s ability to represent itself in all things? Consider a case where a student reports an unwanted sexual advance made by another student in the form of a digital photo sent via text (e.g., the unrequested sending of a “dick pic”). In this example, the recipient of the photo does not feel comfortable addressing the problem alone, and so seeks out a teacher for help.

Should the teacher encourage the recipient to “write up” the offender, forcing the latter to face (at the very least) a small panel of their peers? Or should the teacher take it upon themself to address the problem (in whatever way that might be), thereby saving both the recipient and the offender from having to talk about the issue in front of their peers?

If the latter, doesn’t the teacher 1) encourage the spread of rumors, and 2) invite the students to deal out justice on their own terms, with no guidance from the wisdom of our entire species’ history of justice systems (as understood by the school’s Congress)?

There is a question of legal privacy as well, but do accused students have the right to prevent their peers from determining the right course of action? What if every student attending the school (and every guardian representing them) signed off on a policy saying that all who are accused should expect to face a jury of their peers?

In the case of the “dick pic,” both the offender and the recipient would have to face a small panel composed of three students selected at random from a congress of their peers (serving on the panel is akin to jury duty). The recipient would state their case; the accused would declare themselves guilty or not guilty, and the panel would take it from there (again, in terms of restorative justice).

The mistake we continue to make is that, for all of the real issues, we restrict the judicial panel to a team of staff members and all of the students know it…just as they know how to tell us what we want to hear. How much more powerful would it be if every offender had to face their victims, recognize their offenses, and work to restore justice to the community?

We’re sometimes too afraid of our students, too afraid of young people in general, not trusting them to act faithfully and good. But if we don’t teach them to face their problems head on, in all of their complex reality, then what kind of adults are we teaching them to be?

Future generations are going to be here long after us adults are gone. If we want to continue our species’ long journey out of the wild anarchy of nature, we better make sure our kids know how to act faithfully in the name of justice, and to do so regardless of the complexity of the issue. Not every adult (and not every student) in my school will agree with me, but I think it’s a debate worth having.

Categories
education

A Heckuva Way To Spend Your Days

Sometime in October, I read an article entitled, “How Students Lead the Learning Experience at Democratic Schools,” which introduced me to the Sudbury Valley School in Framingham, Massachusetts. At first glance, the Sudbury Valley School sounded similar to the independent school where I work, meaning we each have no tests, no grades, and a deep belief in the idea that if a person isn’t intrinsically interested in something, then that person won’t be able to learn it in any meaningful way. But that’s where the similarities stopped.

Because while my school doesn’t have tests or grades, we do have assigned homework, compulsory classes, grade level expectations, required exhibitions, and narrative evaluations. Sudbury Valley, on the other hand, doesn’t have any of that. Instead, they have…well…democracy.

(A quick caveat: I have yet to visit the Sudbury Valley School. I have, however, read several books and essays about the school, and so while I don’t have any personal experience to draw from, I do have plenty of book lernin. Fair nuff? Good.)

It all starts with the School Meeting. Every student (and at Sudbury, students range from four years old to nineteen years old) has a vote in the School Meeting, as does every staff member (who are far outnumbered by the students). This means that, when it comes to the School Meeting, a four-year-old child has just as much power to decide as a staff member.

And everything is decided at the School Meeting. It creates all the rules for the school, manages the budget (including the hiring and firing of staff members), negotiates contracts with outside vendors, and more.

But here’s the kicker: except for those things explicitly discussed, voted on, and enshrined in the school handbook, there are no other rules at the Sudbury Valley School. And if you peruse the handbook, you won’t find anything about having to take math, science, English, social studies, or anything else. In fact, you won’t find anything about academics whatsoever.

Which means at the Sudbury Valley School, if you want to go to school and just play video games, you are completely free to do so; if you want to focus all of your time on playing music, you are free to do so; if you want to build an entire metropolis out of LEGOS, or go out and explore nature, or bake cookies, or read science fiction until your eyes bleed, or sit on a couch with your friends talking about whatever, or build a tree fort, or play basketball, or hike through town to the pizza shop, or go fishing…well, you are completely free to do so.

And of course, if you want to learn math, science, English, or social studies, you are also completely free to do so.

Because at Sudbury Valley, school is not something you do; it’s the place where you are. It’s the idea of the school as a village, where young people come to practice and participate in real life.

In the adult world, our time is our own. It might not feel that way, with bills, relationships, families, and work (not to mention jury duty), but (excluding the cogent arguments of Marxism and the three waves of Feminism) we choose to live the lives we lead, and hence, we choose to take on the obligations required to support that life. In the adult world, if our time is not our own, it is because we have given it away.

The same goes for life at Sudbury Valley. When the students come to school each morning, they know that their time is their own, and it’s up to them to choose what to do with it (excluding jury duty, which exists at Sudbury Valley in the form of their Judicial Committee, a student-run group tasked with enforcing all of the school’s rules).

Both Sudbury Valley and my school believe that learning is a function of interest: if a person isn’t interested in a given topic or skill, then they probably won’t learn that topic or skill, no matter how hard or how often you drill it into them. The difference between our schools (at the moment) is that Sudbury Valley then builds their entire model without compromising that belief to the needs and desires of the outside world (including the students’ parents), which is a pretty radical decision.

My school, on the other hand, tries to negotiate a middle ground that will express our core belief while also satisfying the requirements for Vermont’s independent schools, the desires of the local supervisory union, the requests of parents, and what the staff members perceive as the academic needs of the specific students currently enrolled in our school.

But over the past few months, it’s become clear to me and my colleagues that we have strayed too far away from our core belief and that we are in danger of becoming a slightly more relaxed version of a traditional public school.

Thankfully, I work with some incredible and brave educators who have a real desire to constantly evaluate and improve the internal workings of our school, and over the last several weeks, we’ve been engaged in a serious (and sometimes contentious) debate about how to proceed.

Even more thankfully, while I’ve been greatly inspired by what I found at Sudbury Valley (not to mention my experiences with the progressive programs at Green Mountain College and Goddard College), my colleagues have come to the table with vast knowledge and experiences of their own, discussing models and educators who have inspired and excited them.

All of this conversation has led us to start making some important changes at the school. For example, we’ll no longer have compulsory classes (excluding Vermont History, Math, and Health, because those are required by the State), and students will now be given even more  freedom to choose how they spend their time. We’ll still retain learning plan meetings with parents, grade level expectations, public exhibitions, and narrative evaluations (i.e., our various modes of assessment), but it will be up to the students to decide how they want to satisfy those requirements.

Second, we’ve empowered the students to take real control of the school through a School Congress and Judicial Committee. This change has already been instituted and the students are currently in the process of developing the first set of rules for their handbook (the first proposal laid on the table was “No dying”). Personally, this is where I think the majority of their education is going to happen, and I’m incredibly excited to participate in and be witness to it.

I suspect there are other changes on the horizon as well, but if we do our jobs correctly, most of those changes will not be coming from me or my colleagues, but from the students.

That’s what’s so inspiring about the idea of a democratic school. It empowers the students to take real control of their lives, and in the process, gives them real practice as they strive to become successful individuals. It will be scary at times, especially for us adults, but it will be incredibly powerful for these kids.

All of which is to say…man, do I love my job.