What about "Studentship"?

Photo by wu yi on Unsplash

As educators and practitioners of teachership, we strive to think big, act brave, and be our best selves. Why?​ 
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• Thinking big gets results! Research has found the bigger or harder your goals, the better your task performance (as long as you are committed to your goal, you have the necessary skills to achieve it, and you don’t have conflicting goals). When you set difficult goals, you are more likely to try harder and persevere than you would for a moderate or easy goal. You are also more likely to prioritize “goal-relevant” activities over “nonrelevant” activities and seek new knowledge (Locke & Lathan, 2006). Don’t just think about your goals—write them down! Writing your big goal increases goal achievement by 33% compared to just thinking about your goal. You’re even more likely to succeed if you publicly share your written goal (e.g., send it to a friend, post on social media) and then report your weekly progress publicly (Matthews, 2015). 

 

• Acting brave to radically shift our planning time to make room for professional growth and increasing your individual and collective teacher efficacy is incredibly helpful for students (John Hattie, 2018). Acting brave to share the leadership as administrators improves teacher working relationships (Seashore Louis, Leithwood, Walhstrom, & Anderson, 2010) and student achievement (Hallinger & Heck, 2009; Leithwood & Mascall, 2008). Acting brave to take action for racial and gender equity is necessary to address the reality that traditional systems of education are not serving all students.  Black, Latinx, and American Indian students have lower high school graduation rates than white or Asian students (National Center for Educational Statistics). Dress codes position adults to police girls’ bodies, often the bodies of girls of color in particular (“Black Girls in US pushed out of school…”), and trans* students terrified of using the bathroom at school (Gender Spectrum).  

 

• Being our best selves allows us to experience “flow,” or being so absorbed in an activity that nothing else seems to matter (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990). It gives us feelings of being alive and fulfilled, and the impression that “I’m meant to do this.” Our psychological health also benefits from these feelings as well! 

If you haven’t read the previous 3 blog posts, I encourage you to go back and take a look to learn more about these three ideas.  

Knowing these things are good for us as educators, could they also help students? Yes! Absolutely. 

Imagine...a school full of students who think big, thus accomplishing more and seeking new knowledge on their own because they are genuinely excited to meet their goals. With this new knowledge, they are able to act brave and lead change for educational equity by serving in leadership roles within their schools. As a result, they experience improved agency, competence, civic efficacy, academic performance, and relationships with peers and adults (Mitra, 2018), and the school benefits from the better organizational decisions made in the form of students’ improved academic performance. Students are able to identify when they are at their best, resulting in a state of flow when they are at school, feeling alive and fulfilled, and improved physiological health. 

Sounds good to me. So, how do we make this happen?      

Here are three small steps you could take to foster “studentship”: 

• Support students to set big goals. Increase the likelihood they will reach these goals by having them share their goals with a friend, or at least with you, and have them report regularly on their progress. BetterLesson has a bunch of goal setting and reflection strategies on their site. I want you to know going into this, goal setting is a difficult thing for students to do at all levels, but it is definitely possible. I’ve worked with teachers to implement goal setting in 3rd grade through 12th grade, and I’ve seen it done in even younger grades! It is powerful, but it there is a learning curve. You’re asking students to take ownership of their learning instead of tell them what they will do. That’s a big shift. To support students, set your own life/teacher goals. I work with two amazing teachers who shared personal exercise goals with their students (i.e., I will run x miles keeping a pace of x minutes per mile; I will walk for x number of steps this week) because they were examples of goals that were specific and measurable. You could also set class goals together (e.g., we will spend x minutes on mindful breathing this week) or offer sentence starters or post sample student goals to get them started. You can get started with a goal setting template I made in Google Docs so that you can make a copy of it and adapt it as you like. Click the button below to access it. 

Get the Student Goal Setting Template!

• Consider where you could provide opportunities for student leadership. In the classroom, involve students in decisions about what and how they learn. Offer choice where possible. You may consider asking them to co-design the classroom with attention to setting up learning spaces that are aligned to how students learn best. Research has found this placemaking autonomy facilitates self-directed learning in students as young as 6 years old through high school (Parnell & Procter, 2011). On the school level, just ask the following questions: Where students could be included on school committees that deal with student learning (e.g., the instructional technology committee, mastery grading committee, restorative practices committee, scheduling committee, school leadership team). Which staff meetings or professional development workshops could include students in a problem-solving brainstorm or shared vision development activity? How could existing student government leaders take more transformative action by collecting information from the student body and advocating for student needs as they sit on decision-making boards? No need to take action yet, just take a few minutes to think about these questions first. We’re starting small here! If you are ready to take a small action, simply ask students for their thoughts via survey, focus groups, whatever is manageable while also being representative of the student body. Then—and this is critically important—do something with the results. Take action based on what you learn, so students see that when they speak, you listen. That action could just be posting the major takeaways publicly as a demonstration of your commitment to be accountable. Next to the posted takeaways, post a sign up sheet for students who want to tackle the identified problems with you. That’s it for now. Just post what you learned, and ask for help.

 

• Have students complete the reflected best self (RBS) activity (Roberts, Spreitzer, Dutton, Quinn, & Heaphy, 2005). Read this article for details, but in summary, this will involve students asking fellow students, friends, family members, other adults in their lives to provide examples (stories, moments) when the student was at their best. Students then read these RBS stories, identify themes, and write their own best self portrait starting with “When I am at my best, I…”  Then, students job craft (as much as they can within the constraints of school). We want students to think about how they work best, what makes them feel alive and in “flow,” creating better alignment between their “job” as students and their best self portraits. As an educator, pay attention to what students are doing or experiencing in their job crafting descriptions. This may prompt you to think creatively about ways you can provide more opportunities for students to have those desired experiences. You may even summarize class themes, share this with students, and ask them for ideas. Perhaps surprisingly, it’s typically the younger students who are most able to be creative with this innovation brainstorm!   

In the next week, try just one of these small steps. I’d love to hear what you do and how it goes. Respond in the comments below, post on Twitter and tag me @lyons_lb, or tag me, Lindsay Lyons, on a LinkedIn post.  

And if it gets tricky—and it probably will because this work is not easy—reread this blog post to remind yourself of all the benefits for you and your students when you think big, act brave, and be your best self. 
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