Great Ideas |
Have a great idea to share? Submit it to us! Throughout the year, CSEE will publish ideas/tips/strategies gathered from various sources, including our members. Our hope is to better connect member schools, and share great practices in the fields of ethics, service learning, student leadership development, academic integrity, advisory, difference, spiritual development, sensitive teachings about the world's religious traditions, and more!
Please send inquiries or submissions to jenny@csee.org, or pan to the bottom of this webpage to use our online submission form.
Great Idea Archive
Starting at the End Whether your school is just beginning a character/leadership initiative or it already has a robust program with many elements, it will be beneficial to instigate an internal discussion of:
Having clarity and purpose is important to efficiently move forward with a program. Because the issues involved in having these discussions and coming to preliminary working conclusions from them are pedagogically complex, potentially divisive, and difficult to schedule, they seem too often not ever to occur, often leaving schools with loosely coordinated programmatic elements, little ability to determine if those elements are working, and little sense of what resources and staffing their program needs K-12.
What follows are questions that have helped my school, St. Mark’s School, to teach character and leadership more coherently and effectively. We began with articulating realistic but aspirational outcomes for each student and creating growth-mindset-oriented assessments.
Developing answers to these questions—answers always subject to critique and improvement—has helped St. Mark’s determine what our ultimate goal is for each student, which has allowed us to work backwards to determine who can do what when at earlier grade levels as the students build their knowledge and skills throughout their time at school [we are using the shifts after 8th and 4th grades as particular milestones]. Starting at the end has also helped us build a much stronger, clearer case for our program and thereby achieve buy-in from faculty, students, parents, alumni, and trustees.
Submitted by: Dr. Martin Stegemoeller
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The Boarding School Campfire: Finding Meaningful Moments To paraphrase one of the great voices in the world of U.S. independent schools, Dr. Chuck Garrettson, faculty sage at the Hill School (PA), some years ago offered me the poignant insight that few environments are as suitable for meaningful conversation between adolescents and adults as residential school communities. In a word, he asked me, “Where else can you sit around the campfire each night?” Though residential settings bring younger and older minds together each evening in the dorm corridors, family style meals, in particular, clearly bring this image to bear before us: the dining table is the stone circle that surrounds the pit; the food is the warm fire that provides comfort; and the adults and students that share the meal could easily substitute the quiet offer of ideas and attentiveness for the marshmallows toasting on their wooden twigs. In what ways might we nurture further engagement with community, and deeper introspection, at formal meals? The Blessing The Menu Card The Song Consider your community’s social and spiritual settings and explore opportunities to stack and light logs, and to sit together in comfort. It may be that you do not need a cold night and a clear sky to take advantage of the warmth available in the campfire around which we can sit in our schools. Submitted by: Jan Flaska
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The Importance and Practice of Informed Civil Discourse Students want to talk about the things that matter most. Plenty happens around the world, and in their own backyard, that students want to talk about—things they hear on the news; things they read about online; things their parents talk about at the dinner table. While students want to talk about these important and, oftentimes, charged topics, they don’t always know how to do that, and they often don’t have a place to do that. An important function of education is to help students explore and participate in the market place of ideas that a democratic society encourages, all the while learning how to respect the opinions and perspectives of others. Schools can help in three ways:
INFORMED While students might want to talk about what matters most, they often have little or no information about the issues. Here are some things schools can do to teach students to become informed.
CIVIL Unfortunately, the media offers many examples of incivility and few examples of politeness and tact when it comes to people talking about what matters most. Here are some ways schools can help students practice civility.
DISCOURSE Students don’t get many opportunities to practice discourse about charged topics. If we want students to be good at it, then schools need to create forums for students to do it. Here are some examples.
Submitted by: Kevin Mullally
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Kids and Politics The US political campaign weighs heavily on many minds, including school administrators wondering if, or how, to address the headlines. Thoughtful engagement is a necessity for independent schools. We are able to provide guidance to students and even parents during a confusing and sometimes frightening time. This is not to say a school should promote a particular candidate. Rather, this political season is an ideal opportunity for schools and parents to help children better understand and clarify their values. Instead of seeing the current campaign as a problem, it can be seen as full of timely “teachable moments” to clarify and possibly more deeply embrace shared values at school, and to offer parents tools for the home. The following tips are offered by the authors cited below:
Submitted by Bob Mattingly, CSEE
References Patterson, Te-Erika, “Do Children Just Take their Parents Political Beliefs? It is Not that Simple.” The Atlantic, May 1, 2014. Briscoe, Allison, “How to Talk to Your Kids about Donald Trump,” Greater Good Center Berkley, April 13, 2016. "Talking Politics: What to Say to Your Kids." Kids Health. Kidshealth.org. Web. 22 Aug. 2016. Southern Poverty Law Center, “The Trump Effect: The Impact of the Presidential Campaign on our Nations Schools," April 13, 2016.
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Institute for Teaching the World's Religions
6/25/18 - 6/28/18 Location: Northwest School, Seattle, WA
Service Learning Event (Registration link coming soon)
10/17/18 - 10/19/18 Location: Mt. Washington Conference Center, Bethesda, MD