Responsible Digital Citizens Start by Being Responsible Children

An interesting phenomenon occurs when you ask students what the school rules are. Despite not having school rules listed anywhere in the school and without ever having explicitly taught a set of school rules to the student body, students are able to recite a whole cacophony of rules. No running in the halls, not hitting, no name calling, no spitting, no chewing gum, no cell phones, no hats, no pushing and the list goes on. The "NO" list.

At an assembly at the beginning of the year our staff was able to facilitate this innate sense of rule following to an understanding of what it is to be a school citizen. Through a series of activities, big buddies worked with little buddies on converting perceived rules into beliefs. For example, no running, no hitting, no pushing was transformed into "At our school we believe in SAFETY". This process taken from the book "Creating the Conditions" by Diane Gossen proved to be a vital step in changing the conversation. Instead of "Jonny stop running" the conversation becomes "Jonny can you tell me what we believe in at our school?" Since Jonny was part of coming up with the school belief of SAFETY he is able to self correct and begin to internalize appropriate hallway behaviour.

At our school the students were able to boil it down to 6 core beliefs. They include the following:

At our school we believe in Responsibility, Healthy Living, Inclusion, Honesty, Safety and Respect Y.O.E. (yourself, others & the environment). Interestingly, this list was extremely similar to lists that other schools that have gone through this process have come up with.

Next we learned about inukshuks. Simply put inukshuks are Inuit stone statues that are meant to serve as guiding posts. We took our 6 beliefs and cut out big paper stones. On each stone we wrote one of the beliefs. Then we created a giant 2 dimensional inukshuk on the back wall of our stage. Surrounding each of the belief words on the stones the students then listed what that belief looked like, sounded like and felt like. The whole process served as an excellent vehicle for creating a common language of social responsibility and for empowering student ownership of student behaviour.

This school-wide "social contract" has been in place for just over a month. Student know that when they find themselves in the office, the conversation will be about our beliefs and about the student finding a way to repair their mistake through problem solving. Students who make mistakes are seen as providers of learning opportunities and if all involved learn from the mistake the students return to the community strengthened by their new knowledge.

The jump to the virtual world is an easy one. Our beliefs transcend firewalls, routers and servers. Rather than depend on filters, blocked popups and lock down procedures. We help our students understand that being digitally responsible citizens is no different than being responsible school citizens. Along with teaching students about internet safety, students are expected to behave in a manner that adheres to our school beliefs. When a student makes a mistake around internet behaviour, we treat it the same as if the student made a mistake in the real world. We help that student repair any damage done and we empower the student to meet the need saught by the misguided behaviour in another way.

The conversation now revolves around understanding our needs. Because all behaviour has purpose and the purpose is to meet one of the following needs: Fun, Belonging, Mastery, Freedom, Survival. The virtual world is yet another avenue for students to meet these needs. It is important that we help students meet these needs in the virtual world just like we help students meet these needs in the real world. Once you give the students ownership of their behaviour and you give them the vocabulary to articulate their needs the "discipline" conversation changes.

Some of my colleagues don't trust this process, what do you think?

Photo credit: Dave MacLean - Still Water Inukshuk - Powell River BC Canada

Let the Rabbits Run

Our district superintendent started our Leadership Team meeting this week with a parable from the book: Soar With Your Strengths. I goes like this:

Imagine there is a meadow. In that meadow there is a duck, a fish, an eagle, an owl, a squirrel, and a rabbit. They decide they want to have a school so they can be smart, just like people.

With the help of some grown-up animals, they come up with a curriculum they believe will make a well-rounded animal: running, swimming, tree climbing, jumping, and flying.

On the first day of school, little rabbit combed his ears, and he went hopping off to his running class.

There he was a star. He ran to the top of the hill and back as fast as he could go, and, oh, did it feel good. He said to himself, “I can’t believe it. At school, I get to do what I do best.”

The instructor said, “Rabbit, you really have talent for running. You have great muscles in your rear legs. With some training, you will get more out of every hop.”

The rabbit said, “I love school. I get to do what I like to do and get to learn to do it better.”

The next class was swimming. When the rabbit smelled the chlorine, he said, “Wait, wait! Rabbits don’t like to swim.”

The instructor said, “Well, you may not like it now, but five years from now you’ll know it was a good thing for you.”

In the tree-climbing class, a tree trunk was set at a 30-degree angle so all the animals had a chance to succeed. The little rabbit tried so hard he hurt his leg.

In jumping class, the rabbit got along just fine; in flying class, he had a problem. So the teacher gave him a test and discovered he belonged in remedial flying.

In remedial flying class, the rabbit had to practice jumping off a cliff. They told him if he’d just work hard enough, he could succeed.

The next morning, he went on to swimming class. The instructor said, “Today we jump in the water.”

“Wait, wait. I talked to my parents about swimming. They didn’t learn to swim. We don’t like to get wet. I’d like to drop this course.” The instructor said, “You can’t drop it. The drop-and-add period is over. At this point you have a choice: Either you jump in or you flunk.”

The rabbit jumped in. He panicked! He went down once. He went down twice. Bubbles came up. The instructor saw he was drowning and pulled him out. The other animals had never seen anything quite as funny as this wet rabbit who looked more like a rat without a tail, and so they chirped, and jumped, and barked, and laughed at the rabbit. The rabbit was more humiliated than he had ever been in his life. He wanted desperately to get out of class that day. He was glad when it was over.

He thought that he would head home, that his parents would understand and help him. When he arrived, he said to his parents, “I don’t like school. I just want to be free.”

If the rabbits are going to get ahead, you have to get a diploma, replied his parents.

The rabbit said, I don’t want a diploma.

The parents said, “You’re going to get a diploma whether you want one or not.”

They argued, and finally the parents made the rabbit go to bed. In the morning the rabbit headed off to school with a slow hop. Then he remembered that the principal had said that any time he had a
problem to remember that the counselor’s door is always open.

When he arrived at school, he hopped up in the chair by the counselor and said, “I don’t like school.”

And the counselor said, “Mmmm, tell me about it.”

And the rabbit did.

The counselor said, “Rabbit, I hear you. I hear you saying you don’t like school because you don’t like swimming. I think I have diagnosed that correctly.”

“Rabbit, I tell you what we’ll do. You’re doing just fine in running. I don’t know why you need to work on running. What you need to work on is swimming. I’ll arrange it so you don’t have to go to running anymore, and you can have two periods of swimming.”

When the rabbit heard that, he just threw up!

As the rabbit hopped out of the counselor’s office, he looked up and saw his old friend, the Wise Old Owl, who cocked his head and said, “Rabbit, life doesn’t have to be that way. We could have schools and businesses where people are allowed to concentrate on what they do well.”

Rabbit was inspired. He thought when he graduated, he would start a business where the rabbits would do nothing but run, the squirrels could just climb trees, and the fish could just swim. As he disappeared into the meadow, he sighed softly to himself and said…

“Oh, what a great place that would be.”

The immediate response is that, as teachers, we have a curriculum that we are mandated to get through. I guess my question is:

How can we live into this possibility?

The Art of Possibility

At our recent Pro D day, our staff watched Ben Zander and his wife talk about the Art of Possibility. The intention of the viewing was to start the day off with sparks of inspiration and thoughtful reflection on our practice. The debrief was intended to be 15 minutes or so. An hour and a half later we were still have one of the most self reflective discussions I have ever had the pleasure to be a part of.

It is not necessary for me to share the contents of our conversation here because, while the value of the conversation was high, the context of our staff is required to have it make sense in a public conversation. Having said this, I would like to share that our conversation revolved around how to motivate students. How to engage. What can we do to better our teaching practices so that students will want to direct their own learning.

The conversation was peppered with debate around the role of healthy competition and the role of collaboration. One teacher brought the conversation to an audible pause of reflection when she ask why we can't just let the students be. She wanted to let her students quiet the inner voice and just be curious.

Another teacher asked where do we go wrong. Students seem to start kindergarten with an innate sense of learning and then it progressively dwindles.

While other teachers rightfully reminded us of our ministerial duties to report to parents and others. So the question was left floating out there for water-cooler consumption. How can we provide an environment that minimizes the inner voice noise of evaluative pressure and still meet the administrative requirement of our job?

As an administrator, I feel so lucky. I get to go into classes and teach for the purpose of learning. My evaluative relationship with the students is benign.

Sometimes, as a principal, you get lucky and your staff lead you down a path of learning that you did not intend. Thanks Guys!

A footnote: Leadership; the Art of Possibility is a video that the Zanders put out for purchase. Our district is lucky enough to own a couple copies of this amazing video. However, if you are not so lucky, Ben has a presentation that is archived on TED TALKS that speaks to many of the same ideas that is well worth the view, called

Shining Eyes