Sunday, January 24, 2016

Food for Thought: Student leadership


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Dear all,

Hope you have had a relaxing weekend. I want to share this article from Mindshift that provides interesting research about who we should be looking to amongst our students to become the leaders in our classrooms when dealing with issues such as bullying, academic dishonesty, cyber safety etc.

"Despite a surge in policy and research attention to conflict and bullying among adolescents, there is little evidence to suggest that current interventions reduce school conflict. Using a large scale field experiment, we show that it is possible to reduce conflict with a student-driven intervention. By encouraging a small set of students to take a public stance against typical forms of conflict at their school, our intervention reduced overall levels of conflict by an estimated 30%. Network analyses reveal that certain kinds of students (called “social referents”) have an outsized influence over social norms and behavior at the school. The study demonstrates the power of peer influence for changing climates of conflict, and suggests which students to involve in those efforts."

In my career I have heard many people complain that the best candidate didn't get elected to be the class representative on the student council because students just voted on popularity. This article points out that this might not be such a bad thing.

It is also certainly worth taking a look at the link to the Roots curriculum that has been set up to create a student driven positive school climate that might further embed our move towards becoming a positive education school.

See you tomorrow,
Yours
Adrian

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