What’s cool, trending, or in is often hard for us to grasp as educators. By the time we can spot and clearly identify a trend, it’s probably at the end of its shelf life and our students are ready to move on to something new. Cool changes so fast that often our students can’t keep up with the times.
While the specific trends may be ever evolving, we can start to identify common themes and patterns. The cool kids are always a bit edgy, a little bit more “mature”, and a little more concerned about what’s cool. With so much effort being put into being staying ahead of the game, what long term side effects are there to being cool? Does is pay to be popular?
Researchers at the University of Virginia asked that question (study here), and the answer may surprise you. After studying a group of students, starting at age 13 and following them for a period of ten years, researchers found that the popular kids faced more challenges in adulthood than peers who had placed a lower value on social status during school. Reasons for their challenges ranged from drug/alcohol use, higher sexual activity rates, risk taking behaviors and measures of self-control. In other words, what helped make them popular in high school made achieving success as an adult more difficult.
Sure this is an interesting study, but what impact does it have on use as educators? I believe that we have a responsibility as educators to educate the whole child and prepare them for success beyond the walls of our classroom. That needs to include helping students see how their choices now affect later life outcomes. It’s easy to show a correlation between homework & GPA and then GPA to college, but non-academic correlations are sometimes hard to show.
As educators we need to find a way to express a genuine concern for the non-academic traits of our students without coming across as preachy or judgmental. Advice from adults, whether from a parent or teacher can go in one ear and right out the other. But just because our advice doesn’t stick doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. In fact it means we need to work that much harder to get our students to understand and internalize the important life wisdom we are trying to relay.
Clubs and sports are a great venue to advance these conversations. The time commitment required to be involved in a sport can be a direct barrier to some of the poor decisions made by the at-risk popular crowd. As a coach you can also build in cross over lessons that have value both on and off the field. Accountability, timeliness, hard work, dedication, self-control, and cooperation are all natural traits to build in a team and are also skills that translate to success later in life. Clubs and sports also give students the opportunity to make friends based on who they are and not necessarily the “cool” things they choose to do.
A new approach to building successful students that my school is starting this fall is Wisdom of the Warrior. Each Wednesday an upperclassman will have the opportunity to share their success story or pieces of wisdom they’ve learned in high school with a group of freshmen and sophomores. Faculty mentors will be working with the upperclassmen to screen and fine tune their message, but the message will coming directly from them to the younger students. We hope that this builds a greater sense of community in our school and also helps the underclassmen learn the secrets to success without having to make some of the same mistake our juniors and seniors had to make. Coming from a peer, we believe the same message can have more of an impact.
Beyond these two methods, we are still looking for ways to incorporate character education into the classroom. It doesn’t need to be a formal program like Character Counts. It can be as simple as adding a few discussion questions to a book study about consequences. It can be a volunteer project in a civics class. Students learn by doing, and when it comes to character they often learn best when they don’t realize that they’re learning at all.
Popularity in high school is fleeting. Building successful character traits will have a much larger impact on adult success. So I ask you, how will you make it cool to be successful?
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