This tweet popped into my feed the morning after I returned from a weekend retreat with a few dozen of our juniors, and it served as a bit of a framework for some thoughts that had been floating around unformed in my head over the course of the two and a half days.
John Bacon is a prolific writer and a lecturer at Michigan and Northwestern. This tweet refers back to his tenure as hockey coach at his alma mater in Ann Arbor which was the focus of the book Let Them Lead. (I wrote about it and its relevance to my classroom here). Simply stated, Bacon’s philosophy is: set the tone early by establishing high expectations, then hand over the responsibility for leadership to the players themselves, who have bought in to the program.
A classroom isn’t a hockey team but there are definite parallels to the way we do things in Room 130.
And I think that is one of the things that has attracted me to the Natural Helpers program. This weekend was my fourth retreat with a group of juniors from our school, a group of student leaders, and a group of teacher facilitators. (Previous recaps here and here). The Natural Helpers program originated in Washington state in 1979.
School leaders were concerned about teenage suicides and other problems, and searched for a way to disseminate as much accurate information as possible to all the students. They recognized that students listened to their friends before anyone else, and fashioned a system by which students from all the different subgroups in the school could act as sources of accurate information. This was the forerunner of the Natural Helpers selection process. In 1982 the original Natural Helpers Leader’s Guide was written by Roberts, Fitzmahan & Associates, a health education consulting firm in Seattle, Washington. Between then and 1989, when the program underwent a major revision, over 900 schools throughout the United States and Canada implemented the Natural Helpers Program.
https://sites.google.com/elwood.k12.ny.us/mskarch/natural-helpers
Natural Helpers bore fruit at the four high schools in the city of Hammond, then went on hiatus during the pandemic. A couple of the instructional coaches at our school led the charge to re-establish the program in the two consolidated high schools. (Video link to NWI Times package here).
And I think we are moving the needle. Just before we boarded the busses to leave our retreat center last fall, one student asked me “could Morton be like this all the time?”
Bingo. That’s exactly the point. Go back on Monday and let the awesomeness spread organically.
Since I’m a numbers guy, I started doing the math in my head. With two retreats per year, on an ongoing basis there are about 150 students in the building at any one time who have experienced the retreat, roughly 10 percent of our student body.
But, is that enough to start changing the culture? What’s the tipping point?
It sounds like an application of the Pareto Principle a/k/a The 80/20 Rule. Eighty percent of the outputs come from 20 percent of the inputs.
This “universal truth” about the imbalance of inputs and outputs is what became known as the Pareto principle, or the 80/20 rule. While it doesn’t always come to be an exact 80/20 ratio, this imbalance is often seen in various business cases:
20% of the sales reps generate 80% of total sales.
• 20% of customers account for 80% of total profits.
• 20% of the most reported software bugs cause 80% of software crashes.
• 20% of patients account for 80% of healthcare spending (and 5% of patients account for a full 50% of all expenditures!)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kevinkruse/2016/03/07/80-20-rule/?sh=675e458e3814
I’m banking that’s enough kids who default to helping their classmates that it makes a real difference in the day-to-day experience for our students. I hope I’m right.
Part of the discussion amongst the adults during one break this weekend was “what if there was a Natural Helpers retreat for teachers?”
Hmmm. I’ve been at schools where we’ve done team-building outings to kick off the school year. I think that was valuable. So….
What is the critical mass of Natural Helper adults in a building to make real change? Twenty percent of our staff is about 16 teachers. There’s probably close to that many right now who have facilitated the retreat, or at least have been invited by students as facilitators. I think that’s a good sign. In our current atmosphere we’re never gonna get 100 percent of our teachers on board with a school-wide initiative, or even half, but maybe we don’t need that many. Maybe it’s just the core group that make this school an awesome place to be just because they are who they are, daily.
But I wouldn’t be opposed to an off-site safety meeting to discuss the possibility. I seriously think that we can create the culture our kids need to thrive and survive.
But it is an uphill battle. Morale in my building (and my district) is way down. And we’re not alone for what it’s worth. This thread from a western Canadian teacher hit my TL this morning and snapped my head back:
The unroll is here:
I think the reason a lot of teachers are struggling, myself included, has nothing to do with the actual act of teaching.
It’s emotional energy.
The days have become so demanding. Kids need so much, much more than pre-pandemic. The supports are so thin, we have to be…/🧵
Everything to everyone. But we also have to be always on our game. Always positive, eager, constructive, professional, engaged, and more. So what happens to me, and every other teacher I know, is that you wind up with nothing left.
You spend all of your emotional energy at ….
Work instead of on your life. Teachers wind up with no energy to play with the kids in their own life. To spend with their partners and loved ones. Weekends become a frantic sprint to recharge. You wind up just trying to hold on until holidays…
You’re so exhausted that you defer all of the joy in your life. You tell yourself you’ll do all the things that give you life on holidays, or in the summer. But you don’t, because you’re too tired to move, and spend the whole time recovering. Every teacher I speak to feels…
This way, and it’s why so many are looking to leave. I personally don’t know how much longer I have left. My friends, family, my wife, and I, all deserve more of me. This round of contract negotiations will decide the course of my career. If I don’t see a path for things…
To get better, I’ll find another path. And I know a lot of other teachers feel the same way. The stakes are high. Thousands of teachers are working in a job that is hurting them and their loved ones and they’ve had enough. Because when we try to advocate for better….
We get told we’re lazy, entitled, and spoiled by a bunch of armchair quarterbacks who have neither the skills nor the courage to walk into a classroom and teach. People teach because of a deep sense of responsibility. It’s an act of tremendous hope and faith. An act that seeks…
To leave a better world than we found. All we want is to be able to do our job, work with kids, and to not be hated for it. We want a job that we can sustain, and that sustains us. One where we don’t have to watch kids struggle with unmet needs that we are trying our best to…
Meet. One where we don’t feel the constant contempt of our government and a large section of the public. There’s a lot riding on this round of negotiations for a lot of teachers. And if Scott Moe and Jeremy Cockrill don’t step up, I’d suspect they’ll find themselves in the…
Midst of a profound teacher shortage. Because every single teacher I know who has left is glad that they did.
They never come back. Ever. And that tells you a lot.
If we want teachers, we need to make teaching a sustainable job. They are not disposable things to be used up…
And thrown away. People aren’t signing up. People are leaving. And it’s going to get worse without serious action. So I’ll be picketing the legislature and sitting in on QP on Monday. To look the government in the eye. Hope to see you there.
- “This round of contract negotiations will decide the course of my career.”
- “They never come back. Ever”
Woah. That’s a “win or die trying” if I ever heard one.
Our kids and our adults are facing a legit existential crisis.
This is it. This is the battle. It’s real. For the kids and for the adults. So do we have enough Natural Helpers in this building to win it?
Tweaking For No Reason 
2 thoughts on “Tipping Point”