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Guest post: Changing classroom culture at Parker
NOTE: Grants from the Community Foundation and the AT&T Foundation funded the Capturing Kids’ Hearts program at A.H. Parker High School. The Community Foundation grant is part of on-going work with the Birmingham Education Foundation (BEF), which grew out of the Community Foundation’s Yes We Can! Birmingham initiative. Victoria Hollis, program specialist with BEF, wrote this guest post about the results.
Christian McIntosh with Social Contract poster
“I won’t tell you what to expect,” A.H. Parker High School Principal Cedrick Tatum says as he opens the door to Ms. Sandra Weems’ 9th grade social-studies class. “I’ll just let you see it for yourself.”
I am at Parker to learn about the schoolwide transformational process, Capturing Kids’ Hearts, which Tatum has initiated at the school. Capturing Kids’ Hearts (CKH) is a nationwide leadership training program that is designed to “change the culture” at a school by altering the ways students, teachers and administrators relate to each other, especially in matters pertaining to discipline and classroom conduct.
Teachers undergo a series of skills-driven sessions that instruct them on how to implement processes such as the Flippen EXCEL model into their classrooms. To date, approximately 75 percent of the teachers at Parker have undergone the training, and Tatum expects that number to rise to 90 percent by the start of the 2013-2014 school year.
In his view, Ms. Weems’ is an ideal classroom, and she is one of the school’s “process champions,” a teacher whose CKH process implementation has been most successful and who acts as a mentor to other teachers.
“Welcome to our class. Can I invite you to read and sign our social contract?” Christian McIntosh approaches me as soon as I enter the room. As the designated ambassador for Ms. Weems’ class, he greets everyone who comes into the classroom and asks them to sign the social contract, to commit to observing and abiding by the classroom’s self-designed rules.
Items on the contract include “Use good grammar,” “Respect personal space and property,” and “No put downs,” an item that Tatum says is important to the authentic application of CKH. Students who put another student down, whether with words or laughter at another’s failure, may have a “foul” called by another class member and be required to complete two “put ups” in atonement.
This is an example of a self-managing classroom, one of the outcomes of successful CKH implementation. Tatum says the entire school is calmer and quieter now, with fewer disciplinary complaints from the teachers practicing the new design.
“We want to foster an environment where the kids are performing because they respect the people who are here teaching them,” he adds. “We have the ability to be one of the highest performing schools in the district.”
You can learn more about Capturing Kids’ Hearts at the Flippen Group or find out more about BEF, created as a result of the Yes We Can! Birmingham initiative of the Community Foundation. Together we are working on an important Result that our community wants for itself: Children are successful along the education pipeline.
Wow–this is just a beautiful thing to see & hear about, and I hope with all my heart that Parker is able to successfully build a productive school culture. Students and teachers–you deserve to be respected & appreciated at school!
This makes me think of a conversation that I had with a friend who taught overseas, in Asia. It seemed to me that teaching in Birmingham, or really anywhere in the United States, classroom management and getting students to do what was in their best interest was a *huge* part of the job. Really, finding that students appeared to resist an education instead of embracing it was a huge shock to me when I started teaching!
But my overseas friend said that this wasn’t his experience at all. In the classrooms that he taught in, if one student was wasting the class’ time by goofing around or talking back, then that student would quickly be put in line, not by the teacher, but by his classmate. Because they valued their educations, because “smart” was seen as “cool”, and because it was the expectation, they self-moderated.
Birmingham students–if they can do it, so can you! You deserve your education just as much as they do. And, you are just as strong and tough as they are and able to stand up for yourselves as they are. I encourage you to demand the education that you deserve, and insist that your classmates respect your right to it.
To speak for the community as a whole–we love you and we want you to get that education for yourselves.