March 2003
| Volume 60 | Number 6
Creating Caring Schools
Marge Scherer
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Rick Weissbourd
The moral development of students does not depend primarily on explicit character education programs, but on the maturity and ethical capacities of the adults with whom students interact, writes the author. Schools that want to nurture students' moral growth should therefore create a culture that supports teachers' and administrators' moral growth. The author discusses two obstacles to educators' ability to provide moral leadership: the depression and disillusionment cased by the stress of the teachers' job; and the misconception that adults do not grow and change ethically. To overcome these obstacles, school districts need to do more to promote professional cultures focused on both academic instruction and developing adults' ethical awareness and skills.
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Dan Olweus
Careful research into the nature of bullying has dispelled a number of common myths about the problem and provided the basis for the development of an effective intervention program, the Olweus Bullying Prevention Program. After defining bullying behavior and presenting data on the prevalence of bullies and victims, the author notes the ways in which all students in a classroom are involved in or affected by bully/victim problems and illustrates how these roles play out in the Bullying Circle. The author then briefly describes the Olweus program, which several large-scale evaluation projects have shown as reducing bully/victim problems by 30–70 percent. The program has been selected as a Blueprint or Model program in the United States and Norway. The author emphasizes that research-based knowledge and careful documentation of effects are crucial to the success of anti-bullying efforts.
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James Garbarino and Ellen deLara
Adults in middle and high schools often remain unaware of the extent of bullying, harassment, and emotional violence that their students experience, write the authors. On the basis of their extensive conversations with adolescents across the United States, they assert that emotional violence can poison the learning atmosphere of a school, and that students want adults to intervene and provide active supervision to protect them from such violence. The authors offer a concrete plan for monitoring student and adult activity in school buildings.
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Doug Cooper and Jennie L. Snell
Bullying adversely affects practically every student in a school, whether he or she is a victim or a witness of a bullying incident. But many school staff members fail to address the problem because they are misinformed about the nature and extent of bullying behavior and believe they are already doing all they can to prevent it. With training, however, schools can uncover common misconceptions about bullying and create a schoolwide approach to building a climate and culture in which all members feel safe and respected. According to research, that approach should be comprehensive in that it considers the needs of all stakeholders and aligns policies with social-emotional student learning.
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Alfie Kohn
Classroom discipline programs commonly base their strategies on positive reinforcement rather than punishment, but their basic objective is still compliance, writes the author. Educators should ask, “What do students need,” rather than, “How can we get students to obey?” But even educators who try to focus on students' needs may be pulled back into traditional assumptions and practices that result in doing things tostudents rather than working with them. For example, some teachers automatically assume that when students act inappropriately, the students have a behavior problem that the teacher must help them fix. Instead, teachers should consider that misbehavior often arises from legitimate conflicts, and they should reconsider their own decisions. The author discusses this and five other examples of “partial success” in creating caring classrooms.
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Eric Schaps
Building a strong sense of community in schools is both important and doable. The author describes four basic psychological needs that all schools should meet for all students: the need for emotional and physical safety, supportive relationships, autonomy, and a sense of competence. He briefly reviews the research on the benefits of creating caring schools and suggests that schools regularly survey their students' perceptions of the school's sense of community. He then reviews community-building strategies, including class meetings, buddies programs, “homeside” activities for students and parents to engage in at home, and schoolwide community-building activities. He asserts that community building should become—at a minimum—a strong complement to the prevailing focus on achievement.
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Carl D. Glickman
Special rituals, stories, and events can define a school community's core values and ensure their perpetuation. Few schools have enduring symbols that will remind students, staff, and parents of the spirit and values of education in the future. Some schools, however, connect with the heart and soul of generations of students and use symbols and celebrations to convey the promise of education for future generations. The author describes his examination of schools that have sustained school improvement and provides examples of rituals, events, stories, and celebrations that have focused values at these special schools.
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Anthony S. Bryk and Barbara Schneider
The authors conducted a longitudinal study of 400 Chicago elementary schools engaged in improvement efforts, and found that relational or social trust played a central role in the success of such efforts. The article explores the components of trust, including respectful social discourse, personal regard, competence, and perceptions of personal integrity. In schools with high levels of social trust, all parties understand one another's expectations and their own obligations, and the actions of principals, teachers, and parents validate those expectations. In the authors' study, schools with high levels of social trust were more likely to show improved student achievement.
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Roger P. Weissberg, Hank Resnik, John Payton and Mary Utne O'Brien
To sidestep the trap of piecing together untested, unsustainable programs to fix the latest student behavior crisis, educators should develop a framework and tools for addressing students' social and emotional learning needs. School planning committees should discuss many factors, including whether a program is grounded in theory and research, provides developmentally and culturally appropriate instruction, involves families and communities as partners, and incorporates high-quality staff development and continuous evaluation mechanisms. In coordinated social and emotional learning programs, students develop skills to recognize and manage their emotions, develop caring and concern for others, make responsible decisions, and establish positive relationships.
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Rick Allen
A good service learning project has strong ties to academic content, meets a real community need, and involves students in the project's design, implementation, and evaluation. These ambitious targets require the full support of administrators, teachers, and the community. The author reviews the differences between volunteer work and service learning projects and describes exemplary service learning programs in Indianapolis and Philadelphia.
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Anne DiPardo and Pat Schnack
Struggling to convince her 8th grade students that conversations about literature could be searching, impassioned, and personal, Pat Schnack created the Partners in Reading program. In the program, senior citizens and students pair up to read and share their thoughts through journals and meetings in person. Over the years, the program has met Pat's goal and accomplished much more. The unique connection with senior citizens has helped students overcome ageist stereotypes and cultivate empathy, compassion, and commitment to just action.
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Judith A. Deiro
For 18 months, the author studied six junior high and high school teachers perceived by their students as being caring. These teachers believed that students have reciprocal rights and teachers should use their power respectfully. In fact, respect—treating students with dignity by honoring their opinions and abilities—was key to fostering a caring learning environment and promoting academic growth.
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Gayanne Leachman and Deanna Victor
Hoping to increase their students' intrinsic motivation to learn and participate in class, two teachers held regularly scheduled student-led class meetings. In the meetings, students brought up concerns, asked one another questions for clarification, and brainstormed solutions to problems. The teachers found that students not only became more responsible for their actions, but they also became more empathetic to others' feelings. The class meetings fostered a caring environment built on a willingness to risk being honest and to trust the group to be fair.
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Linda Inlay
Everything about a school can teach values and foster students' sense of personal and social responsibility. The author describes River School, a small charter school that instills these values implicitly throughout the curriculum by meeting each student's needs for significance (“I matter”) and belonging (being part of a community). An emotionally safe environment allows students to make mistakes and learn from their choices and the consequences of their choices. She describes the school's “listening groups” and methods for mediating conflicts. When a school listens to students, takes their concerns seriously, and depends on them as members of the school community, students are more likely to cooperate and look toward the common good. Everything that educators do and say teaches character.
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Rachel A. Lotan
Group learning activities foster interdependence and individual accountability when they engage students in complex, multifaceted tasks that have significant content and clear evaluation criteria. Too few educators, however, understand the design elements needed for successful group-work lessons. The author reviews five criteria that define group-worthy tasks: are open-ended; provide multiple ways to show competence; have significant content; allow for interdependence and individual autonomy; and have clear evaluation criteria. She suggests that group work that relies on these kinds of learning tasks has the potential to close the academic achievement gap among groups of students and that collaborating on developing group-worthy tasks also provides powerful professional development opportunities for educators.
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Joanne Rooney
Looking back at her long career as a school leader, the author reflects on the role of the principal in creating a caring school. She points out that what staff members recalled upon her retirement were not the school's large accomplishments, but the many small, personal interactions that “weave an environment in which people care for one another—and ultimately foster excellent teaching and learning.” She discusses the challenges of being a caring principal—the need to balance many conflicting demands, to protect the school from outside pressures, and to promote academic rigor within a caring context. Caring principals, she writes, spend their days doing the administrative tasks that occupy all principals but view these activities from a caring mind-set.
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Kristin V. Finn, H. Jeanette Willert and Michele A. Marable
Despite national efforts to curb substance use in schools, the problem is only growing. Research points to two major factors of this increasing epidemic: The degree to which students feel alienated from their schools. Research has shown that students who are less “bonded” to school are less likely to succeed academically and more likely to engage in disruptive or delinquent behavior (including substance abuse).
The degree to which schools provide the opportunity for substance use. Schools often unwittingly provide both the venue and the opportunity for drug use, largely because school faculty and staff do not have the time and resources to patrol school grounds and detect students' substance use.
There is the need for action on two fronts. Education stakeholders must respond to disaffected students and identify ways to increase students' attachment to their schools. And, school personnel must limit the opportunity for substance use through increased monitoring of places where students sell and use drugs, and through more effective intervention. Many school-based prevention programs have had only limited success. More research is needed to help schools improve their curriculums for drug prevention.
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John H. Holloway
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Steven C. Schlozman
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Heather Voke
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