Howard Johnston
University of South Florida
Tampa, Florida
According to popular perception and popular media, our youth are becoming more unruly every day. We need only look as far as the daily newspaper or TV news show to find examples of the havoc our children cause when they are not carefully supervised by adults. They assault adults, younger children and one another with alarming frequency and violence. They engage premature sexual activity, drug and alcohol use, and a host of other destructive and dangerous behaviors. They vandalize property, steal from homes and businesses, set fire to buildings, and destroy public facilities and recreational areas. Many of our citizens see young adolescents as miniature terrorists set free on unsuspecting and unprotected communities.
Certainly, this behavior is not typical of the vast majority of young people, but it occurs with sufficient frequency and is given enough attention to raise legitimate concerns about how we, as a nation, are raising our children. These concerns are expressed on the editorial pages of our newspapers, in the commentary of news analysts, in the frustrated and angry calls to talk radio shows, and in private conversations among adults all over the nation. "What on earth is happening," we wonder aloud. "Why don't the parents do something about this?" "Why isn't the government (or police, or school, or juvenile court) getting tougher with some of these kids?"
Proposed solutions abound. Hold the parents legally and financially accountable for the actions of their children. Get tougher with juvenile offenders: adjudicate them as adults, set up boot camps, build more prison facilities. Throw disruptive youths out of school. Take away their driver's licenses. Withhold welfare payments.
All of these solutions have one thing in common: they are institutional, organizational and systemic solutions to the problem. They assume that by changing the school system, the justice system, the welfare system...any number of systems...we will produce better behaved and more successful children.
All of the solutions suffer from one fatal flaw: a overzealous faith in the ability of large-scale interventions...systems...to produce good children and youth. They don't. Good children are raised by communities of adults who share common beliefs and values about what constitutes reasonable and appropriate behavior, who accept responsibility for sharing the wisdom of their years and experience with children, and who share a common commitment to all of the children of the community and nation.
That is how we were raised. And it is how good, successful, achieving, happy children are raised today.
What Happened?
Several events have had serious effects on our child-rearing practices in this nation.
o A restructured economy which has seen a dramatic increase in the number of two working adult households. Further, more adults are working longer, both in the number of hours per week and in the number of years worked. There is also an increased number of elderly people remaining in or joining the workforce. There is now a smaller pool of adults who can assume child rearing responsibilities, historically, women and grandparents.
o Mobility of families, often for economic reasons, has broken down extended family support systems, where children were raised in the midst of a rather large number of adult kin, all of whom assumed a parenting role. Mobility has also led to a decline in the number of intergenerational households, homes in which parents, children and grandparents lived under one roof, or at least in the same neighborhood.
o Increased age segregation brought about by the institutionalization of care and recreational services. For the purposes of efficiency, we have created "child care centers," "adult centers," and a variety of other age-segregated organizations. These congregate large numbers of same-age people in a single facility where they have very limited interactions with people from other age groups. In some areas, entire communities are age-segregated, excluding children from living in them either by law or covenant.
o A decline in the number of households with school age children, from nearly 67% in 1960 to about 20% in 1990. This means that fewer and fewer households have a direct investment in the welfare of children or the schools. Indeed, it also means that children have fewer opportunities to interact with other adults in their neighborhoods, since they do not have the natural entree to that relationship that a playmate would give.
o A cultivated aura of fearfulness regarding children. Children have been taught to be fearful of adults; adults, particularly the elderly, are fearful of adolescents; and adults distrust the motives of other adults when it comes to their interactions with children. It isn't possible to establish productive relationships with people you fear.
o A lack of immediate purpose for young adolescents. With the institutionalization of services which used to be performed by adolescents, many children do not have an opportunity to contribute substantially to their family's and community's welfare. Everything from child care to elderly care to lawn care has been organized into large-scale institutional and entrepreneurial activities. Frankly, there is little that young people can do to make a difference in the quality of family or community life. Parents used to say, "I don't know what I'd do without Ricky. He helps me in so many ways." Now too many adults say, "I don't know what to do with Ricky. I'm always looking for things he can do to stay out of trouble." In one generation, youth have moved from being a net economic and social resource to a net liability.
In short, we have no-so-gradually reduced our community-wide investment in child-raising. Fewer adults have a stake in it; indeed, fewer participate in it at all. As a result, our children are increasingly disconnected from adults and their beneficial influences. Too many of us have withdrawn from the child-raising business, choosing to leave it to institutions, such as the school or other organized entities. No institution has ever been a successful replacement for concerned, caring adults in the lives of children. And despite all of this nation's ingenuity and its ability to find technological or systems solutions to big problems, it can't happen in this case.
Looking Backwards
Most us are old enough to remember a different kind of life for children and youth. Try this little survey.
1. Name the people who lived in the fifteen houses closest to you when you were 12 years old. Now try to name the people who live in the fifteen houses closest to you in your present neighborhood.
2. Describe a "typical" after-school day for yourself when you were 10-13 years old. What did you do between the end of school and bedtime. With whom did you interact? Did you learn anything during that time (a skill, craft, hobby, trade)? Name the adults with whom you interacted.
3. What made you "important or special" to your family? What did you do to contribute to the family welfare?
These questions are designed to help us reflect on the kind of environment in which we were raised -- the kind of environment which produced the essentially good people we turned out to be. Despite the fact that it is unfashionable to hold ourselves up as role models, let's face it...the job of schooling is to help produce people like us: hard working people who obey the law, pay their taxes, and make good neighbors and community members.
This type of reflection will help us identify the kinds of experiences, relationships and opportunities which today's children need to find in their schools and communities. Reginald Clark (1983) found that there were patterns of behavior among achieving children, even those in the most impoverished circumstances, which seemed to comprise a "3-9 P.M. Curriculum of Achievement," that affects the beliefs, abilities and values of children who are successful in school and, ultimately, in life.
1. Achievers spend more time in conversation with adults -- eight to ten times as much as non-achieving students.
2. Achievers receive explict achievement training such as music lessons, sports coaching, skill, craft or hobby instruction.
3. Achievers have a regular pattern of behavior; they can count on certain routines in their lives regarding after school activity.
4. Achievers engage in anticipatory behavior, planning for tomorrow, next week, next summer or the long-term future.
5. Achievers participate in activities extending the opportunity to read and write by being engaged with technology or other activities which require them to read high level material and communicate with others for a specific and important purpose.
6. Achievers engage in constructive learning besides homework, such as hobbies, games and related intellectual or high skill endeavors.
7. Underachievers over participate in unsupervised recreational activity, such as watching T.V., or just "hanging out."
8. Later research (Johnston, 1992) found that Achievers describe themselves as doing something "important" or "special" in their homes, families and communities, such as taking care of a younger sibling, preparing family meals, helping with chores or helping in a family business or other activity.
Imbedded in these patterns is a set of objectives which can form the basis for a school program which is designed to improve the relations which exist between adults and children in the school and community, strengthen students' commitment to their community, and restore a sense of important purpose for contemporary youth. These larger aims, combined with the patterns outlined above, provide purpose and direction for revitalizing the advisory program, that segment of the middle level school agenda which has met with only limited acceptance and success.
The Advisory Function
From the original Carnegie report on "the economy of time in education" at the opening of the Twentieth Century, through the work of William Gruhn in its middle decades to the most recent publications of professional societies, the middle level school has been charged with providing adult guidance to young adolescents. Yet this responsibility has been one of the middle level school's most elusive and contested goals.
In a recent survey of middle school teachers, parents and students in five large northeastern and Midwestern states, the advisory program of the middle school came under the most intense criticism. Although 75% of teachers and 68% of parents found that advisory programs were promising ways of helping students develop strong self-concepts and decision making skills, only 32% of teachers and 40% of parents thought the program was fulfilling those goals. Further, while nearly 90% of parents and teachers agreed that it is important for a student to have one adult to whom he or she can turn with a problem, only about half of the parents and two-thirds of the teachers believe that this condition exists for all children in the school.
Student views of the nature of adult-child relationships are even more disturbing. In this sample, students reported the following perceptions of their relationships with teachers.
|
Question |
Yes |
No |
Do Not Know |
| My teachers are happy |
16 |
12 |
72 |
| My teachers like to spend time with me |
17 |
17 |
66 |
| Most teachers like kids |
20 |
15 |
65 |
| My teachers like to talk with kids informally |
11 |
25 |
64 |
| My teachers like to play and have fun |
8 |
11 |
81 |
| There is an adult in my school I could talk to if I had a problem |
43 |
12 |
45 |
Most alarming is that students feel that they know so little about their teachers -- or are so uncertain of their relationships with the adults with whom they spend much of their time. It is difficult, probably impossible, to form a guidance-oriented relationship with someone you know so little about.
What Went Wrong?
What happened during the implementation of advisory programs that led them astray from their original, important and noble purposes? A combination of forces is probably to blame.
1. Many advisory programs were developed, initially, by guidance departments and took on a group guidance format. This led many teachers to say, "I'm a teacher, not a counselor. I'm not comfortable with this role; I'm not well trained for it." The result was that many teachers resisted the inclusion of advisory programs into their schools at all.
2. Some advisory periods were scheduled simply to provide unstructured, free time for adults and children to interact with one another. Many teachers, uncomfortable with their roles in this setting, assumed a supervisory stance: they would supervise the kids during this "free time." The bulk of the interaction was among the kids themselves rather than between teacher and students. In other cases, teachers created "activities" which were designed primarily to engage students in some form of structured task. Because they were unconnected to discernible school goals, these were often seen as trivial or simply a waste of time. Recently, an angry board member cited a recommended advisory activity from the publication of a national assocation. It was suggested that a "fun teacher advisor activity" would be to seat students in a circle and have them move one chair to the right if they answered "yes" to questions asked by the teacher ("Do you wear braces?" Are you older than 12?") If their answer was "no" they stayed seated. It continued, "Yes, students will end up on other students' laps at times! If students wind up being a 'sandwich' -- sitting on a lap while being sat on -- they still move to the right if they answer YES. Just move carefully so as to avoid dumping anyone on the floor." The board member asked, "What on earth is the purpose of this??! Is this what advisory is all about?" Unfortunately, this potentially important program is often viewed as silly.
3. Other programs took on an "issues" or "hot topics" focus in which students had an opportunity to discuss matters of personal or school-wide concern. While this approach is the one that is probably most closely related to the original purposes of the advisory function, many of these topics, such as drug and alcohol use, sexual behavior, peer relations, and values education, became quite controversial and invited a great deal of public scrutiny. In order to quell community concerns over the treatment of these topics, many programs abandoned them altogether or couched them in vague, non-offensive topics and activities which were less controversial. These "sanitized" versions of major issues also came to be seen as trivial by many teachers and students. In addition, the advisory curriculum seldom coincided with problems as they appeared in the lives of the children. If we talk about "death and loss" in October, but my dog dies in May, the advance preparation may not help me deal with my loss at the time it occurs.
As a result of these developments, many advisory programs became collections of activities which were designed to start discussions that many teachers were uncomfortable leading. Just as likely, based on the survey cited above, the advisory period became a supervised time for study or socialization among students. Indeed, the most common advisory activities cited by teachers in the preceding survey were, in order of frequency, (1) informal conversation among students, (2) silent reading or study time, (3) teacher discussion with group, (4) a group activity or game and (5) teacher discussion with individual student. Ironically, in this study the activities that most directly related to the core mission of the advisory program -- conversation among teachers and students -- were also the least likely to happen.
Alternative Views
If we acknowledge the importance of adult mentors and guides in the lives of children, and if we continue to accept the traditional notion that the middle school is a place where such mentorship should occur, we need to create new structures for facilitating productive adult-child relationships in school. To begin, we must consider alternative conceptions of the advisory and guidance function. These might include the following:
Developmental or Social Needs Based Advisory. In this model, either the identified needs of the group or a general belief about what young adolescents need to foster productive personal development forms the basis for the program. This is the model in which students are led to explore issues, concerns and hot topics, under the skillful guidance of a trained leader-facilitator.
School Adjustment Advisory. This model provides a systematic examination of the school-related issues that adolescents face. Moving between schools or grades, improving school performance and achievement, making use of school resources, planning for high school, learning peer mediation skills, or other such matters become the topics of discussion and activity in the advisory sessions.
Service Based Advisory. In this approach, the advisory group is formed as a service organization for the school or the community. Some of these are actually sponsored by outside groups, such as the Boy and Girl Scouts, 4-H, or junior Rotary.
Workplace Based Advisory. This program is organized around the development of workplace skills such as planning, collaboration, and providing a useful and important service or product. (A good model for this type of advisory is found in Learning a Living: A Blue Print for High Performance, from the Secretary of Labor's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills, 1992.) In one school, one advisory group is the "tech squad" for the school, taking care of all the technology and managing computer training for students and teachers. Another advisory group are the "teacher aides," students who work with teachers to prepare class materials, conduct background research, or perform other errands and services. Among the most important aspects of both this format and the service format is the creation of a meaningful and important sense of "purpose" for students.
Interest Centered Advisory. This format allows students and teachers to form groups based on mutual interests, such as a craft, hobby sport or academic field. The students and teachers interact informally, but it is around something they are both interested in. In this model, groups of students may form their own interest group and seek an advisor for it from the faculty or school staff.
Advisory programs based on these models, or others like them, have a number of distinct advantages:
o They rely very much on voluntary groupings or groupings around a specific issue or purpose.
o They allow for teachers who are comfortable with the role to assume leadership. More reluctant teachers can serve as co-advisors or assistants in larger groups.
o They capitalize on the natural conversations which arise between and among people doing something in which they share an interest.
o It provides an opportunity for the advisory program and the students to take on a clear and important purpose in the life of the school or community.
An Integrated Approach
Using these models, it is possible to construct a comprehensive advisory program which allows students and adults to interact with one another, informally and comfortably, around purposeful activities. One school uses as plan like this to achieve its advisory goals.
|
GRADES |
MONDAY |
TUESDAY |
WEDS. |
THURSDAY |
FRIDAY |
|
Schoolwide |
Service Clubs |
Study and Test Skills |
Interest Clubs |
Opportunity Day |
|
| SIXTH |
Welcome to Middle School |
Junior Rotary Tech Squad |
Using Time Wisely |
Book Club Gourmet Club Outing Club |
Homeroom Base |
| SEVENTH |
Leadership Skills and Peer Mediation |
Teacher Corps Internet Surfers Garden Club |
Test-Taking Skills |
Fishing Club Sailing Club Soccer Club |
Homeroom Base |
| EIGHTH |
Orientation to High School |
Health/Fitness Scouts |
What Will I Be? |
Fitness Club Slot Car Club |
Homeroom Base |
In this plan, students meet in team-based groups for the Schools Wide Themes, Study and Test Skills and Opportunity Day. Service and Interest Club membership is open to everyone and children from all grade levels join them. Typically, older students mentor younger students in the activities of these clubs. Figures 1 and 2 (below) give information on two of these service organizations: the Tech Squad and the Teacher Corps.
School Wide Themes change each quarter, assuming a focus of particular importance at that time. The schedule shown above is for the first marking period. In the Spring, for example, the focus is on "Staying Academically Fit During the Summer" and preparing for the next grade or school.
Study and Test Skill preparation is in response to the community's insistence on strong standardized test performance. By linking a portion of the advisory program clearly to the academic mission of the school, the community's concerns about the time invested in advisory activities were abated. Opportunity period, on Friday, is much like conventional homerooms. During this time, students can "take care of business" with other teachers, continue working on projects from their service or interest clubs, get tutorial help, or engage in social activities.
Using a model such as the integrated version shown above, the school can link its advisory program to the very important patterns that Clark and Johnston identified among high achievers. It increases conversation among adults and children, it fosters planning and anticipatory behavior, it focuses upon productive behavior, it increases purposeful reading and communication, and it helps give contemporary kids a strong sense of purpose and commitment to the school and the community.
When the advisory program is connected to the central mission of the middle level school, students and teachers are more likely to participate fully in its development and operation. Further, parents and community members can more easily see the links of the advisory program to the most desired outcomes of the middle level school: high levels of achievement, good citizenship, strong self-concepts based on important attainments, and productive behavior for all students. It's a program worth having, but only if it takes on an important role in achieving the school's mission, and only if we decide to do it well.
References
Clark, Reginald (1983). Family Life and School Achievement, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Johnston, J. H. (1992). Youth as Cultural and Economic Capital: Learning How to Be, in Irvin, J. (ed.) Perennial Issues in Middle Level Education, Boston: Allyn and Bacon.
Johnston, J. H. (1994). Middle School Program Fidelity and Impact Four Years After Implementation: A Community Wide Study, Technical Report MS 94-01, Tampa: The Center for High Achieving Schools.
Secretary's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (1992). Learning a Living: A Blueprint for High Performance, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Labor.
Figure 1: TechCorp Service Club
TechCorp is a school-based service club, comprised of students under the direction of several teacher-advisors. The group provides technical assistance and support for teachers and students in the school.
Goals: Students will...
1. Develop skills in using technology and software: computers, videos, CD-rom.
2. Assist teachers in integrating technology into their instruction.
3. Serve as laboratory assistants in the computer center, the media center and tech lab.
4. Train and coach teachers and students in the use of new software.
5. Conduct parent training on technology used in schools.
Organization: An interest-centered service club. Students meet in advisory groups once a week for training and planning. Three to five hours a month are devoted to service (before or after school, during opportunity period, or during advisory time.) Four teachers direct this group of 67 students.
Costs: Students use existing equipment and software. Two local computer stores sponsor TechCorp and provide funds for T-shirts, parties and a field trip to each of their stores to see the retail, wholesale and service aspects of the computer business. These stores also provide demonstration software and materials for student to review for possible adoption by the school.
Figure 2: Teacher Corps Service Club
Teacher Corps places selected and trained students as aides in grade K-5 classrooms at an elementary school which shares the same campus as the middle school. It also provides middle school teachers with teacher assistants, and middle school students with volunteer tutors. This group serves as a "Future Teachers Club" in the school, and, besides tutoring and other instructional duties, participates in other activities related to the profession. These include trips to local college teacher education programs, talks by doctors and and psychologists on child development, and related activities.
Goals: Students will...
1. Assist elementary students as tutors or teacher aides.
2. Assist middle school teachers in planning, preparation and research for teaching.
3. Volunteer as tutors for middle school students in need of extra help.
Organization: Currently enrolling 49 students, Teacher Corps is supervised by three faculty members, one of whom was this year's "Teacher of the Year" for the state of Florida. Students meet once or twice a week for training and planning. They must volunteer 5 hours per month (although most do much more) as an elementary tutor, a middle school teacher assistant, or a middle school student tutor.
Resources: Teacher Corp is sponsored by a local college of education. It provides opportunities for students to visit campus and provides guest speakers for the group's training experiences. The college bookstore provides T-shirts which show the college and the school's logo. A "teacher corp appreciation dinner" is hosted each year by the teachers who work with the assistants.
[For other ideas about future-teacher programs in middle school visit the South Carolina Center for Teacher Recruitment site and read about "ProTeam," now offered in six states, which includes a focus on increasing the supply of minority and male teachers. ]