If you were on the Athletic Director Leadership webinar, from Role Call Consulting, a few weeks ago, you might have heard this interesting observation from one of the presenters, Amanda Lehotak, AD at Pembroke Hill School. She said that student life traditions were among the many things that the pandemic interrupted. New to her school and new to the role two years ago (Amanda came from college coaching), Amanda was surprised to find missing one of the polarities she was anticipating as an AD: the exciting traditions among team captains and cheering sections, and the unhappy role the AD plays when some of that energy goes over the top. You remember that moment, right? When the AD has to intervene when the student section cheers get salty, or when the excessive display call in the home team's end zone inspires a fan shoving match at the concession stand?
But, as Amanda related, it doesn't happen anymore, not at the game, or the pep rally, sometimes not even on the field. However the cheering section mantle got passed from the seniors down to the juniors, however team captains learned what to do, how kids even made a plan to go to the game got lost during the pandemic, and once back on campus, kids not only didn't have a recent model to work from, they also didn't seem to have the emotional energy and the requisite social confidence to recreate it.
This topic arose more directly at a conference on character education that I attended last week. Many in attendance mentioned helping kids rebuild social skills in advance of the deeper conversations they wanted to have about character virtues. These efforts corresponded, as they did at many schools this year, with much stronger restrictions on cell phones. High school teachers and aministrators from one school found themselves coaching students on the kind of elemental social skills that are an essential part of early elementary teaching--how to enter a group, how to invite others to play, how to disagree.
In all of these cases, and in some examples that have come to mind since, teachers and administrators have created very clear strategies to teach explicitly the behaviors that constitute in-person social fluency, and they've fashioned environments that invite kids to practice. At Pembroke Hill, Amanda and her colleagues worked with advisory groups and grade level deans to subtly teach kids the choreography of a pep rally, made team captain training more explicit across all sports, and created grade level competitions to inspire kids to turn out for athletic contests. At Montrose School, outside of Boston, Barbara Whitlock, the Director of Upper School, and her colleagues wanted to battle atomizing behaviors, students isolating themselves in public. They identified the chapel and a section of the library as spaces for isolation, places where kids could go to pray, or study intensely, or simply be introspective and alone. In all other spaces, however, the girls were accountable for some basic social efforts, e.g. greeting by name anyone newly arriving to a lunch table, or joining group hanging out in the hall, or a seat neighbor in assembly, the body language that indicates the circle is open to join. Many elementary teachers will recognize these skills as straight out of the Responsive Classroom playbook. Hathaway Brown School created (and protected) a social down time in the daily schedule and gave the girls autonomy to construct activities that ranged from guitar playing to hacky-sack to chess. The catch was that you had to join a group; sitting alone in a window alcove, eyes down, earbuds in, was not an option.
All of this requires a certain amount of finesse as it doesn't take much for adult-designed social activities for teenagers to tip over into the youth pastor cringe zone. Nevertheless, standing back and complaining about how the kids don't know how to have fun anymore is simply unproductive. Ideally, the effort should be to scaffold the kids back to independent social skills and then to remove that scaffolding. All of this is hard to measure as well, both collectively--how does one measure "school spirit?"--and individually, but that doesn't mean we should ignore it nor give up looking for the proxy data points that would help us understand the outcomes of our teaching.
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