9 WAYS TO ENGAGE STUDENTS AS CITIZENS TRANSCRIPT (044)
[Peter Horn, VOICEOVER]: Hello friends, as longtime listeners know, one sign you're dealing with a special episode is hearing me instead of visiting vocal talent setting up the show. I have a few full-length episodes in various planning stages that I'll be excited to share throughout the fall, but I thought I'd interrupt the summer break that the old school teacher in me revels in to bring you audio from the 10-minute keynote I delivered to all the school superintendents in New York State in Albany in early March. This was the Winter Institute of the New York State Council of School Superintendents, a.k.a. NYSCOSS in public school parlance. The theme of the convention was The Road to Awesome, which I want to observe now because I refer to “The Road to Awesome” twice during my remarks. I didn't get to pick that theme, but I did get to choose the theme of my remarks, which was How to Engage Students as Citizens. Aligning with my major research and teaching interests of civil discourse and student perceptions of school, engaging students as citizens has only increased in importance in recent months as the race for president heats up—as well as our climate, in this hottest summer on record—and, of course, our culture wars continue to blaze. The style of this keynote is called an Ignite speech, meant to fire people up, but also meaning that the accompanying slide deck cycles at an automatic clip of 30 seconds per slide. I mention this for two reasons: First, sometimes you hear me speeding up or slowing down a bit to sync with the merciless pace of the auto-advance of the slides. Second, I make a joke about the name Ignite early into my remarks, while showing a slide depicting seven of the most-banned books in recent years—for example, The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale—engulfed in flames. Designed by my dear friend Roy Chambers, that image appears on the show page if you want to check it out, and in the video version of the speech, now available on the Point of Learning YouTube Channel. Aight, without further ado, here is Superintendent Martha Group of the Central NY district Vernon Verona Sherrill, in her capacity as President of NYSCOSS. (If you were missing some Shayfer James as intro music, wait for it!)
[02:20]
MARTHA GROUP: It is my pleasure to introduce Dr. Peter Horn for the first Ignite session entitled How to Engage Students as Citizens. Please help me in welcoming my friend and colleague Dr. Peter Horn to the stage.
[02:40]
PETER: This song was written by Shayfer James, a talented musician I first met as my student in College Prep English IV my first year teaching, 25 years ago. After learning about his passion for music and theatre, I made sure to attend the school shows he was performing in. Today Shayfer has fans around the world, with over 2M streams and downloads per month. I can’t claim any credit for Shayfer’s success—he’s worked his butt off for years…
…but I do claim that school plays an important role in whether or not young people come to believe that they have the power to change their community and the world. Which is why I’m honored to be speaking to you here on the Road to Awesome about How to Engage Students as Citizens. We have all seen in recent years that the small-d democratic features of our republic may be much more fragile than we grew up believing.
You may wonder if I took “IGNITE” presentation too literally, but this is a reminder of the stakes you know all too well. Yes, some people do want to ban and burn books—usually, somehow, in the name of “freedom”—but we also know that many others get rich or get elected by fanning flames of anger and fear. Thank you for the good work you do, especially in these strange times. I am not a superintendent, but I do get to work with some great ones!
To me, the solution lies in the quality of relationships between citizens, between neighbors, between family members, and with respect to what we as educators can most directly influence, between teachers and students. As a classroom teacher for 18 years I saw that students tended to learn more the more I learned to understand them as individuals with whole lives and interests outside my class. My subsequent research into how students describe outstanding teaching bears this out.
Students don’t need our help learning to be consumers. But they do need help learning empathy, compassion, and respect for people with differing perspectives. Chances are good they won’t learn from cable news or YouTube how to disagree respectfully or provide evidence for arguments. One focus of my work as an educator, teacher and now consultant has been cultivating these skills and dispositions in students and the faculty and staff who interact with them.
With the right support, young people can learn to listen and make arguments in good faith. If students believe their views and actions can make a difference in their school community, they will be much likelier to believe they can make a difference in the larger community as adults. I make no assumptions about what you in your districts may or may not be doing already—indeed I would love to learn that from you—but here are 9 ways to start:
Respect student feedback about teaching. Most students are not experts in calculus or Mandarin, but they are experts in their own experience of school. But we don’t ask them, or we don’t ask regularly enough. The most helpful feedback I got for 18 years as a high school teacher came from reading anonymous answers to these three questions by every student at the end of every marking period.
Debate less, discuss more. Classroom debates with “winners” and “losers” are often awkward exercises where kids are most concerned with looking stupid in front of their friends. Instead, strive for discussions in which students help each other think through matters of real interest. Yes, this is hard: I believe that facilitating a real discussion is the most difficult skill for teachers to master. Coaching is often necessary, but it can come from colleagues who excel at it.
Develop critical literacy strategies. Put simply, critical literacy pushes beyond the basic reading skills of decoding and comprehension to develop students’ ability to engage texts ranging from science books to poems to pop-up Internet ads, and ask critical questions about authorship, implicit assumptions, and consequences. Critical literacy helps students develop deeper awareness of how all kinds of texts influence our thoughts and actions.
Solicit student viewpoints across the curriculum. Students can practice discussion and critical thinking skills in every subject area, from the pros and cons of vitamin supplements in phys ed to differing strategies for solving a proof in geometry. Again, my theory of action is that kids are much likelier to behave like citizens as adults if they’ve had practice feeling like citizens in school.
Let students co-create learning experiences. Many teachers offer engaging assignments, but comparatively few seek out students’ input in helping to design the kinds of assignments or labs or essential questions that would really fire them up. We adults tend do school the way it was done to us, but as we strive to connect with kids who have now have access to parts of the world we never knew existed, it’s time to change the game!
Invite students to serve on school committees. You probably have a committee right now where student voice could valuably inform the work, like student stress, or academic integrity, or revising the district mission statement. This image comes from a focus group I ran with Martha Group in Vernon Verona Sherrill last month. We were asking middle-schoolers for feedback on language for a draft of a survey for which they had previously suggested ideas for questions.
Provide opportunities to practice civil discourse. Beginning after the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, I co-moderated an after-school discussion forum open to all members of the high school community. We practiced respectful conversations about topics that are hard to talk about, from textbook censorship to same-sex marriage to the killing of Trayvon Martin.
This year as a Penn Fellow in Democratic and Civic Engagement, I’m studying opportunities in and around Buffalo for students to practice civil discourse, so I’m gonna spend a couple more fast-paced slides on why this is so hard! NYU social psychologist Jonathan Haidt likes to quip that we all think we’re scientists, objectively evaluating data and drawing conclusions analytically. Truth is, we’re much more like lawyers ardently defending a position we already believe.
Because we’re all quite fallible when it comes to our own beliefs, we need each other to respectfully challenge us to think harder and better. This is, of course, the point of the Socratic method—or the adversarial system in our courts of law. Argument gets challenged by counter-argument in an effort to seek the truth. To do it well, respect and trust are critical: it’s not about proving an opponent wrong; it’s about seeking the truth.
We don’t need to start practicing civil discourse with the most politically charged topics; in fact, you can’t go deep until respect and trust have been established in a group. But there are many areas of shared concern that are not (yet) politically fraught. How about talking in real ways with kids and colleagues about the changes that AI should or should not affect the way we teach writing? Is it like calculators once were for math teachers, or Google Translate for World Languages? How, or how not?
Back to the list! Make public art. Many schools honor student expression via formal outlets like literary magazines, school concerts and district art shows, but also important are informal coffeehouses, (ungraded) interdisciplinary projects and other spaces for students to exhibit their ideas about the world. As you know, there are lots of kids who won’t raise their hand in class or feel comfortable writing, but they all have something to say.
One of my favorite examples comes from 2011, when I was teaching Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man to a class of seniors who wanted to explore their own feelings of invisibility in school as a result of factors like poor grades or depression or LGBTQ identity. Inspired by the Chinese artist Liu Bolin, they chose spots in the building and volunteered to have their classmates literally paint them into the background. This is a still from the YouTube video.
Let students lead. Especially given our increasingly digital world, students have a great stake in relevant preparation with respect to technology and innovative thinking. In the alternative school I used to lead, way back in 2013, teachers identified a team of students to pilot our district’s first 1:1 laptop initiative. These students met our expectations that they set and solve problems, and they gradually leaned in toward their leadership potential.
Here’s the list again. The slide deck is available with your conference materials, and I’d love to talk with you further about any of the ideas I’ve shared this morning. My podcast for a general audience all about what and how and why we learn, is called Point of Learning. The next episode will feature my conversation with Jonathan Kozol, available, among other places, on my website, which is HornEdConsulting.org. I’m Peter Horn, and I thank you so much for the opportunity to speak to you today about an area of passionate interest for me. Hope to see you again on the Road to Awesome!
[12:27]
That's it for today's special episode, offered without a commercial break. You know, I have to say that at the start of the summer I was pitched pretty hard to add an advertiser to this show, which is the way most podcasts that enjoy a certain following do it, to keep the lights on, as it were. I thought about it for a while, flattered that a company was interested in my passion project all about what and how and why we learn, but you know, I like the way things are set up now, with the monthly or one-time contributions, so that those who enjoy and share these episodes can kick in a few dollars directly to the show. You can learn more about that on the show page. If you're doing that already, thanks again. It means a lot! Your donations helped me make the move last month from GarageBand to Logic Pro and a suite of Izotope tools so I can keep pushing the sound design of this show, staying as much as I can at the point of learning. Thanks as always to Shayfer James for intro and outro music. The new studio release of songs Shayfer wrote with Kate Douglas for their musical The Ninth Hour, a retelling of the Beowulf story that kills in so many ways, just dropped with a brand new study guide hot off the PDF presses, curated by someone you're listening to right now. Thanks to NYSCOSS for sharing video and audio of this speech. Thanks to Greg Jackson of Action J Productions for overseeing the video release, and thanks to you for listening, subscribing, rating (5 Stars), and reviewing this podcast wherever you get it. Reviewing only takes a minute and really helps people find this resource. I'll be back at you in early fall with my interview featuring retired Navy SEAL and Hall of Fame Coach, Dr. John Havlik. See you then!
