Kate Erickson bantered with students in her multicultural freshman communications class in Junction City High School, Kansas, then settled them down with a community-building ritual, their class handshake.
When the buzz from that activity subsided, she said, “Okay, guys, today we’re continuing with our Power2Learn unit on managing stress. We’ve all got stress in our lives, right? One of the stressors in my life right now is a graduate course. My final exam is tonight!
“Today’s lesson focuses on ‘turn-around’ stories-responding to stress by changing the direction of your life. We’re going to look at a video showing one young woman’s turn-around story, but first I’d like to ask Marcus [name changed here] if he’d be willing to share his story. Marcus is one of the most mild-mannered students I know.” (Later she told us she knew he’d be willing to tell his story because he had done so in another class.)
With all eyes on him, Marcus, about 6′ 4″ and 250 muscular pounds, spoke softly:
“When I was younger, I was part of a gang. We beat up some boys pretty bad and put them in the hospital. I went to jail, a juvenile detention center, for 13 months.”
“What did that teach you?” Mrs. Erickson asked.
“To control my anger.”
Erickson asked the class, “Marcus is an example of what?”
“A turn-around story,” a boy said.
It was a moving moment. The stage was set for the rest of the lesson.
She then showed a You-Tube video, “Homeless to Harvard.” In that story, college student Liz Murray tells how she grew up with parents who were drug addicts, lost her mother to AIDS at age 15, and soon found herself living on the streets wondering, “Am I going to end up like my mother or do something different with my life?” She decided to go back to high school and persevere no matter what-and ended up getting accepted into Harvard University. Students in Power2Learn classes say they find videos like these “inspirational.” One boy said:
“Homeless to Harvard” showed someone who didn’t seem to have a future but worked really hard to get to where she wanted to be. If she could get into a good college in spite of all her problems, then with all the support I have from my parents, I should be able to do it, no problem.
Program Feedback on Power2Learn and Power2Teach
We were in Kansas, Iowa, and New Jersey observing Kate Erickson and other teachers to gather feedback on the field-testing of two new programs that are the leading edge of our Smart & Good Schools Initiative: Power2Learn for students and Power2Teach for faculty.
Power2Learn is a high school curriculum (7 units, four lessons each) designed to develop academic and social competencies within a classroom and school culture of excellence and ethics. It can be implemented in one grade level (e.g., 9 grade or, if a school prefers, grade 8), or in heterogeneously-grouped classes.
Lessons are structured to be teacher-taught with the aid of a teacher script and multi-media slides and, in version 2.0 of the program, will include greater use of authentic assessment approaches and some form of accountability/acknowledgment for the work accomplished.
Based on the conceptual framework presented in our 2005 Smart & Good High Schools report (www.cortland.edu/character), Power2Learn seeks to help students acquire:
- performance character competencies such as work ethic, organization, and perseverance and moral character competencies such as honesty, respect, and justice;
- practical tools (life map, effort and attitude rubric, integrity-in-action checklist, etc.) that help students actually use their performance and moral competencies in their academic classes and other areas of their lives.
Power2Teach is a companion professional development program for a school’s full faculty aimed at developing a strong Professional Ethical Learning Community that supports Power2Learn.
What Are the Conditions for Success?
As part of the field-testing, we’ve observed lessons being taught, conducted student and faculty focus groups on Power2Learn and Power2Teach, and solicited anonymous online lesson critiques from teachers and students. Our goal: to identify “conditions for success,” factors that significantly influence program effectiveness, including:
- programmatic features: design features of the lessons we provide, teacher training to prepare faculty to teach them, and guidance from us while they are teaching them;
- implementation approaches: strategies teachers and schools have used to maximize success of the programs.
Feedback from schools is helping our design team strengthen the programmatic features as we create version 2.0 of Power2Learn and Power2Teach. The next installment of this post will share some of the implementation approaches that pilot schools have used to enhance effectiveness.
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