Our Story of Student Character

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Rather than consider noncognitive capacities as skills to be taught, I came to conclude, it’s more accurate and useful to look at them as products of a child’s environment […] And there is growing evidence that even in middle and high school, children’s noncognitive capacities are primarily a reflection of the environments in which they are embedded, including, centrally, their school environment […] If we want to improve a child’s grit or resilience or self-control, it turns out that the place to begin is not with the child himself. What we need to change first, it seems, is his environment.

-From Helping Children Succeed by Paul Tough

 

Lafayette Campus, where Leaders is located, was once a single, large high school with nearly four thousand students and a reputation for gangs, violence, and mistrust. Now a co-located space housing five different schools, it has been difficult to shake the stigma associated with our building: our students must go through metal detectors in the mornings, and uniformed safety agents patrol the halls. At Leaders we have worked hard to cultivate a school-wide culture of respect and compassion, but you won't find sticker charts in our crews or teachers walking around with clipboards counting the number of times a student demonstrates "grit." We've long known that student character isn't something that can be captured by a checklist or with buzzwords, and more and more research is emerging that confirms our theory of action (including Paul Tough's recent publication, Helping Children Succeed, quoted above). Instead, we take a comprehensive approach to character development that blends academic growth with social/emotional learning and personal reflection in crew, classrooms, and the community.

 

If you asked our students to describe our four core values - leading, learning, contributing, and exploring - you would hear a variety of responses. For senior Shazz, contributing means being a peer mentor and founding the school's Key Club, but for sophomore Veronica, who suffers from autism and severe anxiety, it's raising her hand in class at least once a day and volunteering to facilitate group work. When he was a ninth grader on the crew orientation camping trip, George was exploring new heights on the ropes course and the first one in his crew to dare to try hummus; it took Shanice four years before she was ready to tackle an internship at a neighborhood daycare and explore the world beyond her living room. Each of our students comes to Leaders with his/her own level of academic readiness, and the same is true for their character development. Rather than hand down a prescribed list of qualities and characteristics, we ask students to unpack these big ideas and take ownership over what they look like in practice. Students take on leadership roles as College Mentors, on Crew Council (student government), and by redesigning school policies like with our Electronics Committee. They regularly reflect on their learning and progress with academic support days in crew, SLCs, and PoL. They contribute through community-based internships and service projects. And they continually explore new ideas and experiences during intensives, crew expedition, and fieldwork throughout the city. Every week students decide on a Core Values Winner – one person who has exemplified our core values and made a positive contribution to the school environment – and honor him/her at our schoolwide Community Meeting. This approach to noncognitive learning ensures that Leaders students are leaders of not only their academic but also their social and emotional learning.

 

Our students embody our four core values of leading, learning, contributing, and exploring every day, and we have transformed our community through the implementation of restorative practices. At Leaders, restorative practices are varied and individualized. They encompass community building circles in crews, peer mediations to resolve conflicts, care conferences to address harm to the community, and reintegration circles to welcome back students who have been gone for an extended period of time, among others. Through a partnership with the Morningside Center for Teaching Social Responsibility, nearly 100% of our staff have undergone extensive training on how to incorporate these practices in their crews and classrooms in order to promote social and emotional learning alongside academic achievement. Our students work to become ethical people whether that's through our Peer Mediation and Peer Mentoring programs or by exploring guiding questions such as "Can we right wrongs from the past?" in history class or “Is it possible to truly understand someone else’s experience?” in English. Perhaps most importantly, students have become the leaders in our community and the drivers of social change.

 

If, as Paul Tough argues, we must change the environment before we can change people, then students are our greatest resource in creating an environment that celebrates our core values.