2017/09/19 Relationships First Remake Learning Meetup Follow-up

Hello and thank you for attending this month’s Remake Learning Meetup: Relationships First!

Special thank you to Michelle Thomas and the whole Mentoring Partnership Team! I’d also like to send appreciation to the Search Institute for the Relationships First Report. And huge love to Hanlon’s Catering — that spread was unbelievable! Don’t forget to follow-up if you have questions or would like to know more about how to connect with the Remake Learning Network.

In Case You Missed It

For those of you new to Remake Learning Meetups, you will find comprehensive documentation of my minutes below my signature in this email.

We “popcorned” around the room identifying interest areas and pain-points:

• If youth are surrounded by people in the community, peers, family members ,etc, then their outcomes are better
• Express Care
• Challenge Growth
• Provide Support
• Shared Power
• Expand Possibilities
• The importance of Consistency
• Role Models: An activity led by Michelle to inspire the conversation
• “This courage to share summarizes the reason why we do this work. It’s about relationships.”
• We had a longer conversation about Intentionality
• Cultural Capital
• Professional Development
• The “risk” of relationships and building trust
• Education as a Social Justice Issue: Being Better Neighbors

And I just want to share a great quote from the day, “My kid has had a lot of classes on math and reading, but he’s never had one on relationships and social-emotional intelligence.” And my second favorite, “‘You can do this’ are some powerful words.”

Remember, you’ll find all the notes at the end of this email!

Upcoming Remake Learning Events​

• ​Save the Date: The Annual Remake Learning Network Assembly is December 1st. Details will be announced through the Remake Learning Weekly Newsletter and Social Media @RemakeLearning

Upcoming Meetups and Lunch & Learns for the rest of 2017 will be posted via the Remake Learning Network’s weekly e-blast and calendar.

• October 9:Lunch & Learn: Culturally Responsive Curriculum with Dr. Gretchen Generett
• October 24: Meetup: Designing Learning Spaces with Yael Silk at the STEAM Showcase in Nova Place
• Later in November:
• Lunch & Learn: School and Industry Partnerships with McGuffey School District
• Meetup: Aquaponics from Around the Region: A tour of the McGuffey High School

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Get Involved

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If this was your first Remake Learning event, please reply to this email because I would love to learn more about what is relevant, engaging, and equitable to you!

Add yourself or your organization to the Remake Learning Network Directory. Just find the button in the top right corner of the screen and “Add”

Want to host a Meetup or a Lunch & Learn? You can use this helpful Meetup Guide to help you recruit attendees, organize the agenda, and more.

Share, Tweet, & Repeat! Social Media helps us stay in touch and share the wealth. You can find us & other Meetup members by using @remakelearning #RemakeLearning

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Thank you for coming and I hope to see you soon!

—

Ani Martinez

Community Manager

Remake Learning Network

remakelearning.org

Twitter/@theAniMartinez

Unedited meeting minutes:

• Relationships first report from the SEARCH Developmental Relationships
• But what does that look like?
• If youth are surrounded by people in the community, peers, family members ,etc, then their outcomes are better
• Express Care
• Challenge Growth
• Shared Power
• Expand Possibilities
• ​Provide Support​
• Mentoring Partnership provides more training and opportunities to help individuals and organizations reflect and practice these methodologies
• What were some of the characteristics that impacted those of us in the room?
• What are some shared best practices?
• And examine the questions provided by the framework:
• Budget
• Time
• Staff Training
• Organizational work on a day-to-day basis
• Also Consistency! This is very important to young people
• It’s no good if there’s no intent to be consistent
• Mentoring done wrong might cause more harm than it actually helps
• This connects back to Express Care
• How might consistency be expressed as an expectation on the front end?
• In a formal mentoring relationships there are expectations set up front. This is what most best practices state
• If you’re an everyday mentor, you might not see the mentee every day, so it can look a little different. Look at e-mentoring for example.
• Role models:
• Band director
• What made him such a great figure, he was able to “see” students and to identify strengths and let students play to them. It was really powerful
• Girl Scout Leader
• She actually really cared and was out for my best interest
• A teacher in high school, Forensics Teacher; expressing care and providing support and letting young people choose, but also giving people permission to really try
• Important to note that he used to be the football coach
• Pre-college program began after tenth grade year; I was a first gen college student;
• Professor in college that always felt very authentic; I could trust his opinion
• I don’t remember having a mentor growing up, but when I became an adult and the mother of six children, I had an opportunity to be an admin assistant to a nun
• As I was interviewing with her, she was writing down notes, she was asking me personal questions (things probably note applicable in a job interview). Then she asked, “how will you get here, how will you deal with childcare”?
• No one else showed up for the position, so I ended up getting the job. I had to talk with my caseworker and that I either had to take the job or go to school. So I took the position. She sent me to CCAC (Microsoft Office 97). I was so amazed with everything that it did!
• She noticed how I taught
• She became my mentor even though she didn’t know it. She taught me how to use the technology; pushing me to do my job better;
• After following-up with her recently, I had the opportunity to let her know how much working with her impacted my life
• She gave me back my confidence
• This courage to share summarizes the reason why we do this work. It’s about relationships
• This work is life changing, even people that don’t see themselves as a mentor when they are doing this work well.
• Everyone in this room has the opportunity to the same thing for someone else
• And in most cases, it’s a family member, someone at work. It’s not a “Formal Mentor”
• So what was developed by SEARCH Institute to develop these relationships with intentionality
• And how might we cope with the regularness of life to keep these elements top-of-mind?
• Intentionality:
• Relationships are so essential to the work being done at PPS; build community in classrooms, between students, students and staff, staff and staff. It comes back to things like how is the room set-up; a to-do list; calling it out specifically; making sure it’s always part of the process
• Seeing this work as a social justice issue
• Looking at the new Mission and Values of Remake Learning — relationships are a core part of that because thinking about new technologies and media, the key ingredient in 30 years of research prove that relationships (a meaningful one) with an adult vastly improves the outcomes of the young person
• FOOD
• Even thinking about education as a social justice cause, we often don’t think about the constituents that we are supposed to serve. We often let our geographic mindset stick us into a box.
• We should be searching for the people that don’t work exactly we do to build stronger networks of support
• YES
• Are some groups more than others less likely to experience this work?
• The same people seem to have these opportunities?
• Yes, the kids can identify this. And they will.
• You may not as a child be able to articulate what you need, but you can definitely point to who has it.
• How do we combat the very things we created? How do we undo the walls we’ve built
• Going back to the Deeper Learning and Equity Lunch & Learn: there’s a trust element that is needed to serve young people. You need to learn about math before you can learn to code. These are barriers that adults build.
• Mentoring is all about cultivating interest and what a young person needs
• This tangentially goes into a program conducted after school with CMP and Gwen’s Girls. The staff is given a lot of transparency to the intentionality, but this is often not expressed to the young people.
• Even walking young girls through an exercise how they want to use their time can be a good exercise to think about a way to use intentionality in this work
• So who gets these services? Cultural Capital
• Money, who you know — and many of the programs we run, we are seeing the same kids
• So something that Pitt did was look at who they weren’t serving (Westinghouse and U Prep), and they cultivated a relationship with those schools
• You can work with Networks like Remake Learning to support that cultivation
• This could manifest in Mentor Partnership exercises to, like a green dot exercise to illustrate what adults have relationships with what students and think deeply about why (or why not)
• And it’s not just the outliers, we often forget about those kids in “the middle”
• PD is another aspect of where these exercises might be relevant — this could help to identify these service gaps
• The new Remake Learning Mission: We’re thinking of the era of the iphone, AI, how do we change education to fit our new society?
• BUT RELATIONSHIPS have been important forever, and they will continue that way
• We need to constantly remind ourselves — so why is that so hard?
• We’re all experts around this table; and I think about myself too, but I am often unaware and it’s a tough question
• I’m also a coach in addition to my full-time work
• One way I’m intentional, I use the “deadtime” or the warm-up/set-up time to check-in. I use this time to talk to young people 1:1. I think this has helped me. And I think the youth respond to this authentically which leads to the overall strategy.
• These questions even illustrate “intentionality” (How was your day? Are you interested in… etc)
• “My kid has had a lot of classes on math and reading, but he’s never had one on relationships and social-emotional intelligence.”
• I think it’s great that we as a group have these conversations, but I think we are outliers. We are struggling with this as a society — social capital, relationships. There’s a lot of risk in new relationships.
• We have a pool of mentors that teach at our team, but we’ve stopped trying to train them on content. We are training them on mentorship. They come with the skills they have, but we can be more productive (intentional) so that a team can meet these young people and get to a positive relationship with them
• Risk and Consistency
• Students get risk-averse the more their trust is violated
• My mother was a special ed teacher when we were little. She said, “often, learning experiences have to be caught and not taught.”
• Kids will baulk at the sound of lots of these experiences, so I can make it Relevant, Engaging, and Equitable they will respond
• Sometimes, too, this difficulty can come from the organizational standpoint.
• EG: I come from a higher-ed background as a student success coach
• BUT when we talk about relationships, it’s hard for the organization as a whole to think about this. Sometimes you need to slow-down and just talk about things
• Does this itself cost money? No, but sometimes things in the environment has hidden costs (THIS IS WHY WE MEETUP)
• Open it up to the group:
• I work with primarily underrepresented students, and alot of our time is to help them build community among themselves. The thing that will make-or-break this program is their relationships
• If we take that away, the program will crash
• Alot of what I need to ensure is… “is this a safe space?” And how do we make students feel welcome? Are we inviting? Are we engaging?
• In our program, students can feel free to talk about anything, and I can relate back to them (sometimes/often personal things)
• This helps them to open up to us
• We have personaes: Grandmother, Mother, Dad
• We have permission letters to speak to their children this way. There is an opt-out in which they can write their questions. This gives them a chance to be super open and humanize the adults
• We’re programmed to address relationships as transactions through personaes — this points to a tug and pull for teaching to be professionalized and somehow mentorship not… This causes lots of problems!
• A lot of businesses have “transformational leadership” agendas, but they are conducting it in a transactional way
• I don’t want to sell relationships, I want to sell services
• This is a social expectation
• Organizations are measured on such different outcomes
• How many relationship managers are in business?
• There can be clear academic measures; career developers; youth development which IS generally focused on this relationship piece. How might we draw this out more in academics and career fields?
• When TIME is scarce
• It’s hard to let people out when you can’t get a sub- this has to be prioritized
• I’m evaluated on xyz, so a relationship is nice, but how is going to get me to the expected outcomes?
• Also subject to content..
• How can we integrate and promote relationship building in these contexts?
• When we think about sharing our stories to build trust, I wonder is their research how matching identity to mentorship might be?
• Outside demographics, there is the work beyond race and gender, there is a field of research that aligns to natural interests and dispositions (beyond innate career interest let’s say)
• You think about people that are placed in an environment that they cannot connect with
• So how might we better deal with race, identity, and white teachers coping with their whiteness in context of the students they are supposed to intuitively serve?
• How could you teach a white woman to be sympathetic, empathetic, and yet also productively serve as a mentor/educator to a young black male?
• And also, we know that representation matters! If a young black person never sees a black architect, we probably won’t see an influx of black architects.
• So what do we do?
• Transparency to let your guard down with the boundaries illustrated and in place — that will take you so much further.
• But when we have these amazing stories… how do the people that didn’t start from that same starting point, how does everyone work in this field?
• “You can do this” are some powerful words
• We live a deficit focused world
• In closing:
• Being mindful of our starting point and the starting point of the young people we work with
• How might we set boundaries? And to challenge their growth
• Going back to the five elements from the report
• Challenge our environment to understand the impact of relationships and how they play a major role of youth in their development
• Operate from a strength standpoint