Aiming Higher

In February, we held assemblies with all of our students – a “mid-year check-up”. We introduced them to Maslowe’s Hierarchy of Needs and challenged them to recognize that (for many of them) the lower layers of the model were already in place: personal safety, security of food/shelter, security of resources etc. We challenged them to take on more complex ideas like creativity, morality, and self-actualization. What we didn’t realize was that the students would turn this challenge back on us: we have been addressing the “lower layers” through the basic mission in our school, but what have we been doing to address Maslow’s more complex needs?

As part of last week’s blog, we discussed empathy and compassion as key tools underscoring our vision of connectivity at Sullivan Heights. This belief came into place as a product of lengthy, sometimes difficult conversations about our school’s Supporting Student Success model. Part of the development of this vision involved conducting a series of focus groups with a variety of students in our school.  The goal is to revise our school code of conduct by linking empathy and compassion to other values that emerge from the focus groups. It was at this phase of the process where the students surprised us with their challenge: “Aim Higher” they said!

The first of the three major themes was student perception of safety. We could have predicted this because we are constantly putting mechanisms in place to ensure safety. What we didn’t predict was the students higher-level interpretation of what it means to feel safe. Their concerns had little to do with the physical realm; instead, they argued that they did not always feel safe enough to take academic and social risks. Our students used terms like “persecution” and “harassment” in their definition of safety. Of the students involved in our focus groups, most reported they wanted to make it clear that they did not always feel safe from [over] criticism of their ideas.

The second theme to emerge from the focus groups was the feeling of worth. Part of our challenge from February was to encourage students to engage more in the school, to contribute, to make a difference. Since then, our groups argued that they are trying to do so, but we are not doing enough to give them those opportunities. The message we got was that the students “want to belong in their own way” but the school’s emphasis on more concrete, less intrinsic factors like grades, graduation, and requirements is making it difficult for them to be part of the community.  

The idea of “success” was the third of the three major themes. Once again, the students challenged us to rise past the concrete idea of graduation as the ultimate marker of success. They felt that systematically targeting an outcome (recognizing students for getting a good mark, giving an award) missed the point of success. It was loud and clear that we needed to make the act of recognition, itself, the goal. They told us there are many ways we could be celebrating student success, but we have been hyper-focused on celebrating the same traditional indicators: grades, clubs, teams – organized structures that, coincidentally, they perceived as being led by the adults in the building.

Where do we go from here? We will continue to engage our students in these discussions and use these findings to engage other members of our school community in discussion. Although the initial impetus for the process was to revise our school’s code of conduct, we recognize that it indicates that we are ready to review our mission, vision, and goals. The mandate from the students is clear: listen to your own challenge and aim higher.

Identify the stakeholders…       Trust the process…      Trust the people…