Justin Baeder (00:00):
This episode of Principal Center Radio is brought to you by the Project Based Learning Network. Dr. Amy Baeder, the director, is a professional curriculum writer and the leading expert on standards-based PBL. She trains teachers how to write high quality PBL units in the Project Based Learning Curriculum Developer Certification Program. And she teaches leaders how to implement successful PBL initiatives in the Project Based Learning Instructional Leader Program. Learn more at principalcenter.com/pb. Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Baeder. Welcome everyone to Principal Center Radio. I'm your host, Justin Baeder, and I'm honored to welcome back to the program for, I believe, the third time my good friends, Chris and Courtney Dykos. Chris and Courtney are the co-founders of Continua Consulting Group, where they provide MTSS implementation support to schools and districts, including collaborative behaviors and strategies for leadership.
Announcer (01:02):
And now our feature presentation.
Justin Baeder (01:05):
Chris and Courtney, welcome back.
Chris Daikos (01:06):
Thank You.
Courtney Daikos (01:08):
Thank you. So good to see you. Well,
Justin Baeder (01:10):
I'm excited to dive into our topic today because you have been doing some important work around student apathy, which will be a familiar topic to our listeners. What do you see happening in the world of young people around apathy?
Chris Daikos (01:28):
Well, one thing that we're noticing is that it's a continuous topic being brought up by educators for one. And actually when you look at surveys being done, the latest survey I've seen is from 2024 where apathy was the third most referred to concern among educators, and I suspect it's even more now. But that one thing that we're noticing a lot is that complete student disengagement within the work, what we refer to as kind of a sociopolitical nihilist perspective that belief in institutions are no longer how we revered institutions ourselves probably growing up, trust of institutions and kind of a viewing of kind of a meaningless, baseless understanding of what the future would even be. That is one of the things that we're coming across when interviewing educators or educators are actually bringing these concerns to us when they're asking us for support of work. So it's no longer just about quote unquote behavior, it's about the apathy within that behavior.
Courtney Daikos (02:31):
And I guess maybe I would add just as we've continued to understand the unique challenges that are being faced in classrooms in this sort of post- COVID era that we're in, I think increasingly as we support principals and school district leaders and teachers, the complexity of engaging students, it seems like the challenge keeps growing. And often, as Chris was saying, the behaviors that get described to us are inclusive of that lack of belief as well as teachers continuing to struggle with how to make what they're teaching relevant in ways that kids buy in and acknowledge this is something that's going to be helpful to me or that I need. And I think that there's a lot, as Chris was referring to, the sociopolitical annihilism, there's so many elements of what's happening in our world right now that are contributing to kids' disengagement, lack of belief in institutions.
(03:29):
But I also think that they're increasing access to immediate, very tailored information and their trust of that content versus what we provide in schools or what we learn from traditional institutions. It just seems to be a recurring theme of frustration and challenge for educators of how do I reach kids when there's other sources of information that are more appealing and grabbing their attention, honestly, more consistently. So I think that's part of the conversation as well.
Justin Baeder (04:03):
Well, Chris and Courtney, I think the phenomenon of apathy will be no mystery, no surprise to educators.
(04:10):
We are seeing this everywhere. We're not seeing it universally. We're seeing it, I would say, as a stark divide between the kids who are basically doing nothing and the kids who are doing everything. And I don't know if you're seeing this in your local community, but there are kids who are in this activity and that activity and they're going to this and they're going to that and they're going to camp and they're in band and they're in athletics and they're doing all the things and there are other kids who are just doing nothing and yet it's not that they're bored.
(04:39):
They're doing something probably on their phone constantly. There's this constant stimulation from electronics, maybe it's video games, maybe it's the phone. So it's not that they are completely devoid of input and cut off in that way, but it's not necessarily what we would consider kind of optimal engagement with the life that we would envision for young people.
(05:05):
Is that what you're saying as well? Or how would you characterize
Chris Daikos (05:08):
That? Yeah, I would say even to some degree that because of the information they're receiving, so because they are engaged is what's resulting in the apathetic perspective or the social political nihilistic perspective. And again, seeing how institutions are eroding, it's seeing how every angle we're questioning every institution across our entire existence, the question of even like what is knowledge, the question of even what, as far as what's being taught in schools, the question of what is truth. So all of that were foundations that we all walked on and that was kind of like a solid structure that we could believe in, that we can trust our government growing up, that we believe that we could rely on institutions and that we all had a common understanding of what events were occurring and what is truth. And so now that we're in this quote unquote post-truth era, well, that seeks to basically erode everything that a developing individual may be seeking to latch onto and yet all of a sudden it's being defunded or it's being questioned.
(06:14):
And so what do I grasp onto as I start developing my own sense of self and where do I fit within the society?
(06:23):
And if the agencies or institutions that I thought I believed in, well, why would I even want to engage with them? One thing that we like to think about often when we talk to educators is we bring up Brofenbrenner's ecological theory. Brofenbrenner's ecological theory, I like to think of visual of like say you just cut a tree and you're looking at the rings within that tree and the very center of that cut would be the individual. And so the individual, the biological, physiological individuals right there in the middle. When we're born, we're not necessarily completely empty slate, but there's a lot to fill in there. And so a lot of that development is going to be within the environment that we're growing up in. And so within the micro system of that environment is often our family institutions, people, things that we engage with on a daily basis.
(07:17):
That is our microsystem. And beyond that is the exosystem where you're looking at extended family, you're looking at the, back in the day of Braufenbrenner, we would say mass media, but social services, our neighbors, things that we occasionally engage with. And then on the outside of that is a macro and that is where ideologies, culture, public policy, things along those lines are on the macro. So within that interaction across the board of all of that, that actually influences our perspective, our experience. And when we talk about Braffenbrenner, when talking to educators, this was a system that was developed, an idea concept was developed in the '70s. So the mass media, I would actually tack that onto the individual. I would actually move over that and call that the cell phone, right? Cell phone is where we get mass media nowadays. It follows us everywhere we go.
(08:15):
It notifies us twenty four seven. If you don't have your notifications off, you're constantly getting buzzed and distracted and it's connecting with you. And so that is resulting in pulling all those systems together and actually dropping it onto the individual. And so now that our kiddos are experiencing this constant flow of information, which has also resulted in the constant flow of questioning our institutions, it's resulted in a constant flow of even like having a negative self perspective as well because there's this false presentation of what individuals look like and how they live. And so basically they're being influenced by corporate manipulation and eroding basically their own self-confidence in themselves as well as because we've seen study after study after study shows anxiety increases based off that experience. We know that based off that experience, depression increases off that experience and we do know that there are influences foreign entities as well that are seeking to question all of our institutions.
(09:25):
And now you have this basically individual who's experiencing psychological isolation and emotional isolation because again, that ecological theory has been condensed into this one cell phone or this one device that is resulting in individuals being isolated. And so right now we know that individuals are experiencing more time online than actually engaging with real life friends. 80% of youth, basically there is a significant amount of time increased on friendships online and I'm putting if this is online, you'll be seeing the scarecrows around the word friendship. So we're experiencing a friendship recession right now. And when you look at the Harvard Kennedy Schools study from 2025, I believe, and it's called the Friendship Recession and it shows again that based off this ecological theory, which has been condensed into a cell phone, it is resulting in a reduction of in real life experiences, resulted in reduction of in real life friendships.
(10:36):
And right now across the board of all age groups, 40% of Americans only really have online friends. So we're having emotional isolation, we're having physiological isolation, we're having students being told don't trust institutions. And so that has resulted in a significant amount of students now experiencing what we're referring to as social political nihilism because why engage? Why trust these institutions?
Justin Baeder (11:05):
Yeah. I'm really struck by the shift from essentially a physical location. I as a physical person am in my home, in my community, in my school, and the kind of circles ripple out from there. And it really seems like that has been disrupted so that I'm not necessarily a person within a physical location, a physical community, real people that live around me that I interact with, but through the rectangle that I hold in my hand 19 hours a day, I am identifying with maybe other fans of a YouTuber, maybe people who are anonymous. I had three different people say grossly inappropriate things about educators to me on Twitter, anonymous account that somehow I've allowed into my life. I've blocked them all because they were not appropriate and I don't want that in my life. I think it's much more worthwhile to have connection with people that we have real connection to.
(12:00):
And we should say, we have known each other for I think about 20 years this summer. We went to the same principal prep program, principal handbook program.
Chris Daikos (12:07):
I'm wearing
Justin Baeder (12:09):
My sweatshirt today from Washington. We got your purple Huskies hoodie on.
Chris Daikos (12:13):
Huskies.
Justin Baeder (12:14):
And you met there as well, right?That was where- We
Courtney Daikos (12:16):
Did.
Justin Baeder (12:16):
Yeah. And here we are.
Chris Daikos (12:18):
We fell in love at principal camp.
Courtney Daikos (12:20):
We did.
Justin Baeder (12:23):
And here we are 20 years later having based much of our lives on that experience going through a program with an institution and real people. And I think we share a concern that, not to be two kids these days, but really a lot of kids these days are experiencing so much of the world through their cell phone and hardly anything else. Is that the reality?
Courtney Daikos (12:48):
And one of the things I was thinking about too when you posed the question about the students that are like overly engaged and those that are underengaged and sort of this dichotomy of a lot of how we're seeing kids show up in school. And what you were reminding me of is something that I am consistently consulting to principals and superintendents and district leaders on, which is a little bit of a divide around the parenting behavior as well. And so part often we're hearing from leaders that some of those same kids that are struggling with engagement in school, that lack of belief in the institution is being reinforced at home. And so conversations where one of our principal colleagues that you know very well that we went to school with was sharing a story recently of trying to have a conversation with a parent after a student did something really egregious and violent and the immediate response from the parent was to place blame on the school or to basically assume, "Well, what did you do wrong that led to my kid doing that?
(13:47):
" And I don't mean to make blanket statements about parents, but I do think that I worry that some of the same influences of disconnecting, distrusting institutions, primarily engaging with folks online, that there's a subset of the folks that are parenting right now that are, whether they recognize it or not, are reinforcing this disengagement by saying things that are discrediting to the institution, encouraging their students to not believe the institution, to blame the institution, to question the institution, to not take responsibility for their behavior. It's fascinating to me that I'm having conversations with leaders in very different communities that are naming the same issue, right? So we serve some rural communities that are very isolated and they are the same groups of folks that have all grown up in that same community for decades or for generations, I should say, as well as urban leaders that have quite a mix of income and ethnicity in terms of who's represented in their school.
(14:45):
And as you described that there are parents and students that are fully engaged and leaning in and a part of all the things that the institution still offers and there are also subsets of kids and parents that are coming from a place of doubt and suspicion and lack of trust in the institution. And I wonder for those kids that are feeling this sense of apathy, how much is that mirrored by what's going on at home as well? I don't know, Chris, your thoughts on that, but ...
Chris Daikos (15:17):
Well, that isolation also is another factor to consider is third places within
Courtney Daikos (15:23):
Our communities
Chris Daikos (15:24):
To go to. There's been an erosion of that and that was revealed in a study called Monitoring the Future out of the University of Michigan. And it shows that teens are spending, one, not only is it online is way easier, right? It doesn't take a lot of coordination. You don't have to
Courtney Daikos (15:41):
Think
Chris Daikos (15:41):
About the logistics of getting to point A and point B in that process. But when we look at the monitoring the future, if you look back basically at the introduction of the smartphone right around 2008, there's a precipitous drop in the amount of times weekly that kids go out to a third place to actually face-to-face interaction.
(16:07):
And again, it's not just about the cell phone, it is also the erosion of, again, these third places. Another thing that came out of Monitoring the Future was the expense of say youth sports has gone up dramatically since we were kids. So the cost of that as well, there's an equity issue here as far as access. When you look at all these studies, there's a sociodemographic factor to consider about. So the wealthier the family is, actually, the less time the kid is on the phone and there's this direct correlation of, again, the poorer they are, the more time they're spending on these phones. And so there are a multitude of factors here to consider. And so when we are considering the service learning as a vehicle to actually address some of this apathy, to address a sociopolitical nihilism, the reason why I keep going back to that phrase, social political nihilism, is that it's about agency.
(17:06):
And so when kids don't feel that they have agency, they're more likely to disengage. Again, think about your instruction. If it's not relevant, kids are more likely to disengage. If it is relevant, if it is meaningful, they will engage. And so when I was teaching, a lot of my teaching was with serving students with emotional behavior disorders and programs where many people weren't expecting these kids to be politically engaged or socially engaged or seeking to make change within their community. But once I would introduce the service learning projects, I was inspired a lot by Dr. Jeffrey Anderson who taught me a lot about service learning when I was doing my pre-service training and I stayed in touch with him as I was working and he helped me develop these service learning projects and I would make sure that one, the kids are selecting the topic.
(18:03):
Of course, I'd present a few relevant topics and then have them select what it is. They would identify the topic that they are hoping to engage with and of course there's a learning process of it. So we had kids look at like say housing and within Seattle during that time period there were still on the covenants of neighborhoods indicating that if you were a person of color, you couldn't buy a house within the community even though it was no longer enforced, but it was something they felt very passionately about this and we started engaging this project to actually get those covenants removed. And so it was a year long project to kids stay engaged with it. And after that project was done, they were able to present to a state senator and a state rep. They were able to go to communities and speak about it.
(18:55):
Every time my kids would be involved in these projects, not just this one, they would walk about two or three feet taller because they were proud of themselves. They were making sure that they were engaging with others and being able to present these projects. So the agency again is there. They're realizing how to maneuver through the system. So they're understanding basically these rules. They're looking into city code, they're looking at the WAC, the Washington State Code. So understanding how to navigate the laws, understanding that they could actually speak to somebody who is a rep or who is a senator, understand they can actually access these individuals. My students definitely felt that they had some agency and the end result is that many of my students that graduation rate was ... I can't do a direct correlation, but graduation rate for my kiddos across the board if you don't do anything is abysmal, more likely to drop out than graduate, more likely to be incarcerated than graduate once entering such programs for emotional behavior disorders.
(19:56):
But my kiddo's graduation rate was an outlier among our program and we've seen some really positive life outcomes. Some of my kids have gone on to college and just found out one of my students graduated from a nursing school, extraordinary. So I'm not saying again, this is cause, but there is a correlation here and finding purpose is the best thing we can do for any of our kids.
Courtney Daikos (20:21):
And I think when thinking about this topic, I know Chris has been really passionate about this and as we have increasingly educators that we're working with bring up the issue of apathy and we revisit the idea of like in our state, there used to be a much more rigid requirement around a service learning, a project that you had to do, a senior project for example, that used to be part of how you graduated and got a diploma and those expectations have sort of dwindled and that's problematic, I think. How do we start to institutionalize this practice again? Because when you talk to educators about it, they get excited. They recognize the power of kids having something outside of themselves that they can lean into, especially if we're talking about secondary aged kids, developmentally, middle and high school kids, their sense of justice is incredibly strong.
(21:12):
And I think part of where when they're not engaged in something that they feel relevant that they can help change the overwhelm in terms of information, I was thinking also not only about our institutions, but also our physical environment. Kids are questioning these days, what is the long-term outcome of the earth and how are we focused on that? And so I think historically a lot of teachers that are passionate about the climate have infused environmental justice into their instruction. And whenever I've seen that in practice, it's always been empowering to kids because they want to be a part of the solution around the environment and yet, I think we've moved away as in terms of like state and district policy, at least those that we engage with here in Washington, primarily we don't focus on this as an important aspect of the experience the way that we used to.
(22:11):
I think there's an opportunity to reinvest in that, if that makes sense.
Chris Daikos (22:15):
The title of the article or blog is of course structured, right? Structured service learning. And so the structured component, the reason why emphasizing the structured component is that looking at mentoring as well, mentoring great intervention no matter what. There's always a positive effect as long as there's the right engagement and right connection. But the effect size for unstructured mentoring or just mentoring in general is about 0.2, maybe 0.3 at the most. Once you add that structured component, the effect size of service learning doubles. And so you're looking at like upwards of like 0.6, which is incredible.That's an effect. You can say like, that is making change. And so when we're looking at the structured component of the mentoring, it needs to be there. So within Seattle, we used to have service learning requirements, but it was unstructured. And this is why I think maybe it fell apart.
(23:20):
This is why I think it went ... Well, it's still there, but it's not as effective-
Courtney Daikos (23:24):
That's not structured.
Chris Daikos (23:26):
And of course across our state it wasn't structured. And so this is my wonder is if we have the structured service learning components where you can potentially infuse other lessons within it. And with that structure, ideally you are also providing the structure towards agency for the kid. So as you're providing the guidelines of like, this is what we're going to be working on, these are the components. Let me give you some guidance. Let me give you some institutional knowledge so that you can actually engage with those institutions and actually find that agency within yourself. And so again, study after study, there've been meta analyses on mentoring and what is the key thing within that mentoring or one of the biggest components of the benefits of mentoring is an adult who understands it has some institutional knowledge, an adult who understands to explain to that kiddo how to navigate life.
(24:18):
And that is where again, we see the structured component within service learning as a kind of a quasi mentor/service learning approach.
Justin Baeder (24:31):
Well, it's really interesting because as I think about the different activities that the kids who are in every activity are in and what the requirements are, things like student council, things like service clubs, honor societies, they have service learning requirements. You have to turn in a time log, all the volunteering you did and in some years that has added up to quite a lot of hours for our kids, but
Courtney Daikos (24:54):
They
Justin Baeder (24:54):
Got them easily of all the things that they're in. But you're talking about something that is universal, not for the kids who are voluntarily signing up for everything and their parents are driving them to everything, but you're talking about something that is truly universal as a tier one, everybody has to do this so that we are inoculating our population against that apathy that seems to arrive naturally through our screens and the world we live in.
Courtney Daikos (25:18):
Yes.
Justin Baeder (25:20):
So in Washington, as you mentioned, there has historically been, is it a graduation requirement? Is that right?
Courtney Daikos (25:26):
It used to be, but it's gone. So it used to be that in order to graduate and it was, I can't remember because when I was an assistant principal in Highline, it was definitely part of our graduation requirement. And I know at the time, because our son was in Seattle, it was also a requirement of Seattle public schools, but I don't know exactly how much that was district decision versus states. I thought at some point at Washington, the state was also saying, you have to have a version of this in every district and most districts don't have it anymore. So one of the wonders I just had actually as we were talking about the universality was being an administrator in a high school where we had to make sure all kids did a senior project, which wasn't always necessarily service learning, but it could be and there had to be hours associated with it, but it was structured and it was around really more career exploration or finding something to go be a part of and learn from out in the community.
(26:22):
And I think I suspect that part of why it was moved away from in districts like Highline where I was, was because it was a lot of oversight we had to manage in terms of making sure that if this was a requirement for kids to graduate, then every adult in the building mentored a few kids going back to structured mentoring around getting it done. And I remember, especially because as an administrator, we took on some of the kids that were most at risk of not graduating and making sure they had a lot of support to get that project done. And it was a lot of effort for those kids to make sure that they jump through the hoops technically, which is not really what we're talking about. We're not trying to encourage hoop jumping, but I suspect that part of why anything that ever was universal around this has been eliminated is because of other priorities that have been stacked on top of schools and the fact that you have to have capacity within leading the building to ensure that kids do something like this.
(27:22):
I suspect that's part of why we've seen it go away and a lack of understanding of the power of what it could be as well as like I said, that didn't have to be about serving the community necessarily. It often was, but it was just more about showing that you learned about a career path, which is still, of course, very valuable for kids. I mean, we could probably argue the value of both before they graduate, but I suspect that's part of where it's fallen apart and where folks really haven't been advocating to keep something like it going in the face of all these other things that we're now expecting schools to address, if that makes sense.
Justin Baeder (27:57):
I wonder if we also started to pull back from anything that felt like a requirement that could be ... We worry about barriers and
Courtney Daikos (28:06):
Rightly so.
Justin Baeder (28:07):
If it's going to be tough for this kid to get this number of service learning hours and then they don't
Courtney Daikos (28:10):
Graduate
Justin Baeder (28:11):
Us, we feel bad about that. But I think we're also coming around to the wisdom of the high expectations that like making kids do things, get off the
Courtney Daikos (28:20):
Couch. Is important. And by
Justin Baeder (28:22):
Engaged in the world, if we take that away from kids, there are big profitable companies that will gladly fill their time through their device.
Chris Daikos (28:32):
Absolutely.
Justin Baeder (28:32):
And I think-
Chris Daikos (28:33):
And sell their beta.
Justin Baeder (28:35):
It's absolutely. So what do you recommend? What are you helping schools do? I know you've got a conference coming up in a couple of months to help schools and other agencies think through how we do this and how we do this at scale so that it can serve large numbers of students because certainly that sounds daunting to go back to mentoring every single kid through some sort of project, but we've got to do something. What do you recommend and what are you helping schools do? Well,
Chris Daikos (29:00):
One, it doesn't have to be individualized, right? So it can be a class project, it can be a group project. And so that can take on some of those numbers. Having class or the cohort, not just your classroom, but the cohort identify concerns throughout the community. So things that they find relevant and then break that up into bigger groups. So it doesn't have to be an individual service learning project. Again, it can be a group. I've had groups as large as like 12 kids focusing on tutoring, reading. So we went to first AME and kids who were actually struggling themselves as readers got into, on we had to learn about why is reading important, why do they need to actually improve their own reading, learning about what access you're going to have if you are a strong reader and then of course going and providing the service for kids who are learning to read themselves, preschool, kindergartners.
(29:54):
And again, I can't emphasize enough like the kiddos I'm talking about are kiddos that That had been kicked out of their comprehensive schools, brought to my school under the identification of emotional behavior disorder. Most of my kids were gang affiliated. Now kids that you're thinking about sitting down with three, four year olds and reading little kid books to them. Again, those kiddos were walking two to three feet taller after those experiences. Again, thinking about as far as a system, how do you do that? Again, understanding, of course, it can take more, it can be over a series of years. It doesn't have to be all at once in one year. If it's a 60 hour requirement, we can push that to middle school. It doesn't just have to be at high school. We can start earlier with this. We could probably even start in elementary.
(30:47):
Again, creating a culture over a span of time to which it is common for you to engage in your community, help identify things that need to be improved in your community and realizing that you actually have the agency to do that.
Courtney Daikos (31:05):
I was also thinking of just some of the ways as you're talking about the universality versus the tiering of these kinds of things. So thinking through an MTSS lens and a couple thoughts I had. One, when Chris was talking about doing the reading tutoring, which is a common approach. We were just in a school recently where I heard a second grade teacher talking to her students about the fact that the fifth graders were going to be coming to read with them. Great cross-age relationship kind of opportunity and heard her taught basically saying, "You have to earn that through your behavior." So that's just a little flag I'll put there around how I think we often well-intended put these kinds of opportunities in front of students and then they get gatekept away from the kids that maybe need them the most because there's a perception that they have to earn access to them.
Justin Baeder (31:54):
And I think on the other end of the spectrum, we tend to take things that could be good service learning and turn them into ... We reserve them for punishment. I'm a big fan of
Courtney Daikos (32:03):
Picking up
Justin Baeder (32:03):
Trash. I don't think picking up trash has to be a punishment. I think it's like everybody should put trash because there's lots of trash. It just gets on the ground. If that's seen as a punishment and not something that you engage in positively, then that's a lost opportunity.
Courtney Daikos (32:15):
That also connects to the kids who pick up trash, that should be a logical consequence connected to a kid that made a mess. So we shouldn't just be randomly giving kids the opportunity. We have overleaned in schools on consequences that we can easily facilitate, like you have to clean the lunchroom or you have to stay in from your recess. And yet what the research on behavior would show us is if I made a mess in the cafeteria, then I should have to clean the cafeteria for the next few days. Or if I hurt someone at recess, then I should miss my recess. But if I did something in class that has nothing to do with the cleanliness of the cafeteria or the behavior on the playground, then my consequence really shouldn't be either of those things because it's not going to help me learn anything about what I did wrong in class.
(32:57):
But that's just my little soapbox for a minute about how unlogical most consequences are in schools, which really just get perceived as punishment and they're not going to support any sort of a change in behavior. But back to this idea about how we support schools to think about actualizing strategies like this. In the last few years in working with middle and high schools, we've been growing our own belonging survey, which is based on many other SEL screeners that school districts often use, but we really try to tailor it so that it's actionable for schools. And so part of how we do that is kids are asked things about their level of engagement. So essentially we're learning right away who feels like I'm not very engaged. I don't really care about being here. I don't feel like I belong here. Do I have friends here? Do I have adults I trust here?
(33:45):
And we actually encourage schools to gather the information of who's essentially it's not an anonymous survey the way that we've designed it. It is connected to the email of the student. But what that does is it allows the school to then, through an MTSS lens, look at, okay, who are all the kids who've said, "I don't feel like I belong at school," and who also said, "I don't feel like I trust any of the adults at school. I don't feel like there's purpose at school." That's now actionable for a staff to sit down and go, "Wow, we know that this is 20% of our population that says we don't feel like we belong, we don't feel like we're engaged and we don't really feel connected to any adults." How do we as adults now as a tier two strategy, each of us maybe wants to make connections with a couple of these kids and what would that look like and how could we even do some unstructured mentoring?
(34:32):
I know Chris is talking about structured is very powerful. But I think in terms of when you look at a whole school population and especially again, I keep thinking about secondary schools because this is really where the apathy conversation's happening. This is where we know we're struggling the most with attendance and engagement is in middle and high school classrooms. And so what we've seen be successful in some of the secondary schools that we're helping use tools like that is really is getting down to who are these kids knowing exactly. And again, we often know who they are as you described earlier, they're not engaged, their grades are showing it, their attendance is showing it. And yet the research is overwhelmingly clear that if there is one adult that really starts to consistently build trust with that student and invest in what is the purpose that that student wants to see in school, what's relevant to them, showing them what it could look like to have a career or people out in the world that do what they're interested in, there's tons of evidence that that is how we help change outcomes long term for kids and embed resilience for kids is when they see themselves in a relationship with an adult outside of the home and schools can take action around that and the service learning could be layered onto that absolutely, but I think we've seen secondary schools increase the number of students that say, "I feel like I belong at school.
(35:51):
I feel like I trust adults at school. I feel like I have friends at school." When the schools have been intentional to really understand who are those students that are telling us very clearly via surveys and other data, "Hey, I'm not engaged. I don't see purpose." And adults really being intentional to think about, "Okay, how would I engage differently with that student to better meet their needs, to better build a relationship?" And that can be manageable if a whole staff, we only asked each adult to take on one or two students, not an entire class or all five periods of classes. Again, you need to build relationships with all of those kids, of course, but the intentionality of that adult relationship as well as really trying to build with that kid a sense of purpose. If that was connected to a service learning project or an opportunity to serve the community, I think that's some of what we're starting to talk to schools about as well is how do we marry those two strategies so that again, it feels manageable and tailored targeted to those kids we're most concerned about that are not engaged.
(36:51):
We will be at the University of Washington Bothell here just outside of Seattle with some fun adult activities in the evening if you want to join us, but we will be focusing really on, we're calling it collaborative behaviors to teach into how do adults collaborate, what does it look like as leaders and practitioners in a school to really have structure and protocol around how we communicate, how we use data. It's common in a lot of schools to have professional learning communities or PLCs and we know that those are incredibly powerful when there is structure again, structure is kind of a theme here. And so Heather Sweeney on our team has created a rubric of how does a leadership team help an entire school move each professional learning community along the stages of PLCs, which really is about do we get along, do we understand how to look at data together and are we on the same page of how we're growing our instruction?
(37:44):
So that's the first two and a half days is really for leadership teams, principals, district leadership teams to get into the specifics of how do we get along as adults, how do we get along as human beings and then how do we really focus on improving practice with each other? And then the second half of the week will be really focused on the behavior of students, but how do we collaborate in the most effective ways to provide a continuum of behavioral supports across all three MTSS tiers. So if you're interested, if you have a team in your school or district that focuses on solving problems of behavior both at an individual and a group or whole school basis, this part of the conference is really meant to give that team more strategy, substance tools around how do we best match interventions to students for behavior?
(38:35):
How do we communicate across the tier one and tier two or tier three environment? How does the kid get to transfer those skills? How do we exit kids from those strategies? Often we find that behavioral interventions become sort of permanent versus something that kids get access to and eventually are weaned off of because they show more and more mastery of the improved behavior. So that's the second half of the week is really fine tuning how do schools support all kids, but especially those that are struggling with behavior.
Chris Daikos (39:06):
And the second half again is meant to make sure that you have these structures in place so that you're not reactionary, you're not responding to these things, you're getting ahead of it. So we've seen that when we get teams like this together prior to the school year even starting, extraordinary success way to launch the school year as well. And of course the rest of the year is going much better, much smoother because you're ahead of these things and many of these kiddos and concerns often are predictable because we know a lot of who our kids are that we're trying to support and we're kind of familiar with their behaviors. And so if it's predictable, it's preventable and if we have these structures in place, it's going to make everybody's life easier, including the student especially.
Justin Baeder (39:46):
So if people want to learn more about the conference, where can they go online?
Courtney Daikos (39:52):
So they can go to our website, continueconsulting.com, and we have a page dedicated to the collaborative behaviors experience. It's available right on the homepage when you go to our website and we are offering discounts if you want to join us for all five days or if you want to bring a team for either of those two sessions, would love to support you in thinking about how your teams collaborate as well as how your schools continue to support kids with behavior.
Chris Daikos (40:16):
And your listeners may know Kristen Rodriguez
Justin Baeder (40:21):
Guest here on Principal Center Radio.
Chris Daikos (40:23):
Right. So she'll be there with her book and is part of the evening event to where she's going to do a little reading and then we're going to have wine. So should be fun and we're trying to make this as collaborative and fun as possible.
Justin Baeder (40:39):
Wonderful. Well, Kris and Courtney, thank you so much for joining me again on Principal Center Radio. It's been a pleasure. Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com/radio.
